Instructors at most career levels can agree there is irony in our expectations of students’ writing abilities. While we want our students to write well, and often bemoan their abilities, relatively few of us actually teach writing skills (Guilford 20012001, Robertson 20042004, Reynolds and Thompson 20112011). The real paradox, according to Reynolds and Thompson, is that while writing and associated communication skills are fundamental to most careers in ecology, “the teaching of writing is not central to science education” (Reynolds and Thompson 20112011). Few undergraduate biology courses “make explicit what most scientists agree […] that comprehension of primary scientific papers and communication of scientific concepts are two of the most important skills” students must learn (Brownell et al. 20132013). It would be easy to blame the lack of writing instruction in science courses on associated instructional challenges, but there are likely more straightforward reasons why ecologists do not emphasize writing skill development in their courses: Bean (20112011), an academic, consultant, and writing program administrator, adds to the list: In 2011, Bean published Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. In it, he productively counters these reasons for reluctance on the part of academic educators. The rest of this article will focus on some of the highlights from Engaging Ideas and associated scholarship that may be most immediately valuable to university science instructors. A rarity in a market flooded with books advising on how to become a better writer, Engaging Ideas emphasizes how to become a better writing instructor. In the early chapters, Bean outlines the research and theory underpinning current best practices in writing pedagogy and the scholarship of rhetoric and composition. The rest of Engaging Ideas is an immensely accessible, cross-curricular, writing instruction how-to book. It is also one specifically calibrated for the busy academic instructor. Consistent with current research on science writing instruction (and writing instruction more generally), Bean takes a “writing across the curriculum” approach which (1) discredits many of the myths obstructing science-related writing instruction efforts and (2) provides accessible and actionable recommendations for how we can enhance science learning through writing skill development in our own classrooms. Bean has taught and studied cross-disciplinary writing since 1976, and his tone is collegial and reasonable. He acknowledges, and is intimately familiar with, the challenges facing instructors throughout academia. His book is an explicit invitation to collaborate on the important work of developing students who can think and write critically. Bean's invitation is well-founded and timely. Results of a recent, informal, non-representative poll of readers of a well-regarded ecology blog bear this out (Merkle 20182018). Of 97 respondents, 77% (75/97) feel they should teach writing more than they do. Perhaps surprisingly, small class sizes, advanced courses, and TA availability were not the primary reasons people do not teach writing. However, other time-based reasons were as follows: Lack of time for grading time-intensive assignments (70%; 42/60) was the dominant reason, along with lack of time to support students (60%; 36/60). Lack of writing instruction (30%; 18/60) followed. The literature documents additional reasons. During a review of faculty perspectives on the importance of academic writing and instructional responsibility, Wei Zhu found, “much of what students need to write, particularly in upper division undergraduate and graduate level courses, is specifically tied to their disciplines” (2004). However, many professors perceive writing instruction responsibility as secondary to content knowledge (2004). Worse, Jackson et al. found that, among the faculty they surveyed, no academic science faculty felt they bore “any of the responsibility for developing discourse competence in students” (Jackson et al. 20062006). Essentially, Bean argues, we often pose our students reading and writing problems in a dialect they have not yet mastered (Bean 20112011), without feeling responsibility for helping them learn the dialect. Jackson et al. further highlight the issue of mismatched reading versus expected writing output. The undergraduate science courses Jackson et al. studied emphasized textbook readings, despite the primary written discourse of science taking place in academic peer-reviewed articles and the majority of assignments being article-esque laboratory reports (2006). This is a surmountable issue. Julie A. Reynolds and her colleagues hypothesize that the reluctance of STEM faculty “to incorporate writing in their courses derives largely from a lack of awareness of the research on the effectiveness of [writing teaching methods], since most published findings are in journals not regularly read by STEM faculty and the majority of studies use methods unfamiliar to most scientists” (Reynolds et al. 20122012). We can do something about this, by reading up on this literature. We can also reach across campus to our colleagues in English and Rhetoric and Composition Departments as well as the experts running our campus writing centers. Stepping out of our disciplinary box in this way can be mutually productive (e.g., Heard 20162016). Further, Melissa Kosinski-Collins and Susannah Gordon-Messer provide a case study for how to overcome misconceptions based on lack of familiarity with best practices in writing instruction. Cosinski-Collins and Gordon-Messer incorporated writing assignments of varying lengths throughout multi-session biology laboratories. They observed considerable improvement in both students’ comprehension of processes and their ability to articulate experiment design, execution, and results (20102010). Throughout Engaging Ideas, Bean uses examples akin to Cosinski-Collins and Gordon-Messer's efforts. And these three authors are not alone in asserting that “integrating writing and critical thinking components into a course can increase the amount of subject matter students actually learn.” However, Bean's particular contribution is in articulating both how these components contribute to subject matter mastery and how to get students to that point. For example, he discourages using quizzes and lecturing about assigned readings in favor of approaches such as (1) confirming that some texts are challenging, (2) assigning material not covered in class, (3) reducing the number of readings, and (4) developing and assigning reading guides. Commonly in some disciplines, reading guides are question sets that “define key terms with special disciplinary meanings, fill in needed cultural knowledge, explain the rhetorical context of the reading, illuminate the rhetorical purpose of genre conventions, and ask critical questions for students to consider as they progress through the text” (Bean 20112011). Furthermore, Bean admonishes us not to confuse the draft-like nature of examination essays with the potential polish of revised writing. In particular, excessive “worrying about spelling, grammar, and structure when you are trying to discover and clarify ideas can shut down any writer's creative energy.” To frame this point, Bean paraphrases P. Hartwell's insightful and useful grammar categories, which organize writing and speaking into the following: (1) native grammar learned in childhood, (2) academic and scientific study of grammar, (3) Standard Written English (which Bean points out is a prestige dialect), (4) parts-of-speech grammar, and (5) stylistic grammar (e.g., Strunk and White's Elements of Style). Importantly, Bean explains the documented detrimental effects of error-seeking and fixating on sentence-level errors. He provides insight into why we should not prioritize grammar. He couples this advice with a series of recommendations for how to shift grading, correction, and students’ own goals toward clarity, organization, and self-correction instead of “handbook grammar” perfection (Bean 20112011). Bean also frames the grammar issue in historical and socio-political lights, and gives particular emphasis to an argument shared by other writing instruction scholars (Bean 20112011). That is, ecology instructors (and indeed all writing-related instructors) should aim for writing skills that enable students to be actively intellectual citizens, rather than enshrining critical writing and thinking exclusively within the purview of academia (Harris 20122012). Bean asserts that it is how our language is structured, and a lack of complex reading experience, which impedes the production of writing that “is both a process of doing critical thinking and a product that communicates the results of critical thinking.” Make no mistake; Bean does not recommend teaching science writing as creative writing (although there are fine examples of how this synthesis can be powerful and productive, e.g., Skillen and Bowne 20142014). However, Bean is explicit: We can easily and inadvertently squelch students’ enthusiasm for thinking and writing about ecology by forcing them to adhere to rules and processes that we ourselves do not even follow (Bean 20112011). Bean further cautions us against assuming our simply need to be drilled on grammar, in order to execute an articulate and insightful laboratory report or research paper. He cites one study of American English speakers who, when asked to analyze new information by writing about it, “experienced partial or total linguistic collapse…Grammatical, lexical, and syntactic skills they seemed to have mastered disintegrated. Their papers were nearly incomprehensible” (Bean 20112011). “It may well be,” Bean hypothesizes, “that competence in editing and correctness is a late-developing skill that blossoms only after students begin taking pride in their writing and seeing themselves as having ideas important enough to communicate” (Bean 20112011). Other research suggests such skill development is also contingent upon students fully understanding the importance of writing for their own professional work outside of college (Guilford 20012001). Substantiating this premise, Bean cites cognitive research which indicates “that the frontal lobes of the brain, which seldom reach full maturity until age twenty-three to thirty, are needed for complex writing tasks that require writers first to wrestle with advanced, domain-specific knowledge and then to read their emerging texts from the audience's perspective” (Bean 20112011). In essence, we are asking students to do things their brains are not yet mature enough to do on their own. Throughout Engaging Ideas, Bean demonstrates both the pitfalls of leaving students to their own devices and the feasibility of us helping them meet our expectations. Shifting the focus from grammatical error to “writing as thinking” frees us and our students to focus on articulating the big ecological ideas we want them to appreciate, synthesize, and retain. Even so, Bean's lasting contribution to academic ecology instructors will not just be to emphasize students’ use of content versus merely acquiring content and using commas correctly. Engaging Ideas’ most essential contribution regards how students actually learn new information. He writes: “As cognitive research has shown […], to assimilate a new concept, learners must link it back to a structure of known material, determining how a new concept is both similar to and different from what the learner already knows. The more that unfamiliar material can be linked to the familiar ground of personal experience and already existing knowledge, the easier it is to learn” (Bean 20112011). So, our students will more readily connect to complex theories of speciation and conspecific competition if they are invited, through writing assignments, to make connections between these processes and the biological knowledge they already possess. Or better yet, students may learn to write and think more compellingly through making analogies between their own personal experiences and these foundational ecological principles. Bean suggests several ways to facilitate these past experience–new knowledge connections: (1) Students are assigned to explain the concept in writing to someone who has never heard of it (perhaps a relative or friend); (2) students are provided data and methods from a research article and directed to write the introduction and conclusion, according to disciplinary norms; (3) students are provided templates with fill-in-the-blank spaces designed to teach specific, formal writing structures expected in the discipline; (4) students are prompted to write short, summary-response essays about articles or course lectures. If organized in a sequential fashion, these assignments can also build students’ confidence in their capacity to write longer texts that meet disciplinary expectations (Bean 20112011). Herein lies Bean's book's overall utility; in it, he details how we can jumpstart developmental processes that bring students to this level of sophisticated writing. In short, Bean advocates two tools: (1) Use “scaffolding exercises that encourage students to take notes, generate ideas during prewriting, make an outline, or learn the structural features of different genres” and (2) link all new learning “to preexisting neural networks already in the learner's brain.” Do so by using “informal writing assignments aimed at helping students probe memory, connect new concepts to old networks, dismantle blocking assumptions, and understand the significance of the new concept” (Bean 20112011). Bean challenges us to pose writing problems that (1) compel students to develop research-substantiated argumentative positions and (2) require revision that results in refined expression and critical thinking. He provides a stand-out case study that could certainly be replicated in ecology classes: A business professor assigns numerous one- to two-page essays arguing for or against increasingly complex theses. These essays require research, data analysis, and reasonable argument development; revisions for higher grades are encouraged. Providing revision opportunities, Bean maintains, is of utmost necessity. He encourages requiring multiple drafts of even seemingly straightforward writing tasks (Bean 20112011). While this suggestion might seem obvious, subjects of a study exploring science faculty perceptions of their role in writing instruction reported providing few or zero revision opportunities (Zhu 20042004). However, research Bean cites indicates revision is central to students mastering discipline-specific writing (and writing more generally). Throughout Engaging Ideas, Bean provides guidance, in some cases step-by-step, for the following: (1) shifting the focus from grammar to critical thinking through writing, (2) designing writing assignments that are directly relevant to science course topics, (3) scaffolding writing assignments and revision to support student skill development, and (4) re-thinking our expectations to encompass the significant responsibility of instructors to model and mentor students toward enhanced writing skills. With Bean's book in hand, we no longer have an excuse to mutter into our cups about our students’ lack of skills. Bean and the bulk of the writing instruction literature make it clear—we can tap into a body of scholarship that will help us help our students meet mutual expectations. Engaging Ideas is an invaluable guide to doing so. Meghan Duffy, Jeremy Fox, and Kelly Kinney provided valuable comments on prior versions of this manuscript.