Mellish is helping prepare the next generation of business writers as a teacher at Cedarville University.
For seven years, Sarah (Kanzeg) Mellish (WC ’97) believed she had the perfect job.
As the marketing content specialist for Yaskawa America Inc.’s Motoman Robotics Division, she served as the company’s voice. She created most of its marketing content and helped shape its brand message.
At home, life seemed equally settled. Her son Matthew was preparing to graduate from high school while her daughter Audrey was thriving in fourth grade at Middletown Christian Schools.
“I enjoyed my job, and I had a great family at work and at home,” said Mellish, who lives in Middletown with her husband, Andrew, superintendent of Middletown Christian Schools.
Yet in the spring of 2024, something felt different.
“The Lord was tugging on my heart,” Mellish said. “I felt He was saying, ‘Sarah, you need to do something for the kingdom.’ I thought, ‘Really Lord? I love my job, and things are great. Make it apparent what You want me to do.’”
Within a week, she had her answer.
Mellish’s department was downsized, and she and her coworkers were let go.
“I remember thinking, ‘Well, Lord, You made it apparent,’” she said. “The Lord had other plans, and I’m so thankful for it.”
Mellish found her calling in the last place she expected to find it: as an instructor of professional writing at Cedarville University. She hopes to do more than share her expertise in copywriting. She lists her goal as guiding students to “boldly stand for absolute truth, living out the Christian life in a fallen world.” She teaches several different classes, including Writing for Communication Professions, Professional Writer in the Corporate Culture, Copywriting, Portfolio I & II, Writing for Industries, Writing for Publications, Style & Mechanics, and Writing & Designing for Documentation.
“I treat each class like I’m teaching a new co-worker how to fulfill a task in the corporate world,” Mellish said. “It’s a professional yet conversational style that is friendly, direct, and open to questions. I think about how my favorite mentors in the business world treated me, and I implement that style in the classroom.”
In her Professional Writer in the Corporate Culture class, students are tasked with addressing real-world scenarios from a Biblical perspective. During a group discussion, she spoke with students about managing deadlines and other workplace stressors.
“By the end of the class, I had students in tears,” Mellish said. “Life gets busy, and there is so much pressure to constantly perform. While a strong work ethic is extremely important, the students were reminded that God encourages rest and reliance on Him.”
Cedarville has played an important role in Mellish’s life. Several family members attended the university; she met her husband at Cedarville, and her son is currently a sophomore there.
Mellish, however, never envisioned working there. Although both her mother, Kathy Kanzeg (who taught Algebra IA and IB), and her sister-in-law, Laura Kanzeg, taught at Worthington Christian, Mellish never pictured herself working in a classroom.
“I never saw myself in education,” said Mellish, who graduated from Cedarville with a degree in communications in 2001. “The Lord doesn’t always work in the ways we expect.
“I’ve been able to take all of the skills I cultivated in the corporate world and bring them to Cedarville.”
An unlikely turn of events led Mellish to return to her alma mater. In 2022, her niece Elizabeth (Kanzeg) Rowland was taking a class in Professional Writing and Information Design at Cedarville and invited Mellish to do a question-and-answer session with her classmates.
“She said, ‘You’re a copywriter and what you do is right up our alley,’” she said.
Several months later, Mellish joined the school’s Advisory Board for its Professional Writing and Information Design program. In 2025, she was hired as an instructor.
“It has been an interesting journey,” she said.
A self-described extrovert, Mellish hasn’t had trouble speaking to a classroom of students. However, planning a lecture is vastly different from delivering one.
“I have my habits and ways of doing things down,” she said. “The problem is they’re all in my head. Having to prepare a lecture and slides and get all my thoughts together has been an interesting transition. I want to make things applicable enough so students can retain them and digest them.”
Mellish’s lesson plans include something she didn’t encounter in college: the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“I have people who are saying, ‘AI is going to take away writing jobs, like people were talking about robots taking away jobs years ago,’” she said. “We tell our students, ‘AI is a tool, but you’re the person who’s in charge of it. You need to be a good steward of it.’”
Mellish knew she wanted to be a writer early on. Worthington Christian High School English teachers Pam Woods (ninth grade), Lorraine Hyder Smith (creative writing), Rachel McDonald Yanac (10th grade), the late Al Iten (11th grade), and Peggy Bell (12th grade) nurtured her development.
Mellish credits Iten with driving home the concept of “Point. Quote. Explanation.” While Bell’s instruction on long-form writing prepared her for college and article writing.
But Woods taught her something she needed to start writing.
“I remember (Woods) looking at me, smiling, and saying something akin to ‘You have a gift, Sarah. You need to keep working at it,’” she said. “(From that point on) I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know how the Lord was going to use it.”
Now it’s Mellish’s turn to inspire students to see where their writing can take them.