Mentoring early-career writers: understanding developmental stages of writing and of writers

Mentoring early-career writers is hard. It can be easier if you recognize that both pieces of writing, and the people who write them, go through stages of development – and the most useful help you can give depends on those stages. I’ll suggest approaches to commenting on draft writing and to mentoring writers based on these ideas about development. The goal: let’s maximize the value of your help to your mentees, without inflating (and maybe even reducing!) the time and effort you need to put in.

About the Speaker:

Stephen Heard is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of New Brunswick and a Past President of CSEE. He’s also rather obsessed with scientific writing – how we tend to do it, how we can do it better, and how we can teach and mentor others so they can do it better too. He’s the author of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing (Princeton University Press, 2 nd ed. 2022) and coauthor of Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2025). He blogs, with an almost comical lack of focus, at https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/.

(*Note: Event will take place in English)