Broadening our writing and mentoring BASE

A tool and facilitation method for talking productively about writing habits

Figure 1. For some comparative fun, see here my co-author Steve’s base, alongside his estimate of a typical grad student in his lab. Read on for my BASE and estimates of students I actually work with at my own institution.

One thing that sometimes surprises folks as they learn to write, and even more as they learn to mentor writers, is that the technical part of writing is only one piece of the challenge – and for many writers, not the largest one. There are also behavioral, emotional, and social aspects to writing, and challenges arise from each. Most writing guides pay relatively little attention to those, likely because the technical aspects of writing – structure, vocabulary, style, genre conventions, and the like – are more straightforward to address. But technical proficiency isn’t the only thing writers need, or the only thing our writing mentees need to be helped with.

This multi-dimensionality of writing challenges is something Helen Sword has written about extensively (most obviously in Writing With Pleasure, but it’s woven through all of her work). She provides a simple exercise – the BASE exercise – to help you start thinking about writing beyond the technical. We’ve found it useful to expand on Sword’s implementation, in a way that we hope wouldn’t offend her as its inventor. So first we’ll introduce you to the BASE exercise and then share our ideas about extending it to help you think about writing mentorship.

Gauging your own writing habits

The BASE exercise is simple. You use four interactive sliders to rate your writing habits. The technical skill we usually focus on in scientific writing is what Sword calls “artisanal habits”. The others are “behavioral habits” (everyday writing behavior), “social habits” (talking with other people about writing), and “emotional habits” (the emotions writing, or thinking about writing, provokes). [1] The four sliders spell BASE (if you put them in a slightly different order than we did), and moving them makes a quadrilateral.

I recently re-did my own BASE assessment (Fig. 2). [2] I actively enjoy and seek out talking with other people about my writing, so my social slider is way to the right. And I prioritize co-writing academic writing projects and love my primary collaborators, so I have quite positive emotions around that work. I have also written, edited, and taught across a host of genres and feels confident in my artisanal skills. It’s the behavioral side of my BASE that’s narrowest: I don’t write every day, although I sometimes feel I ought to. But I do draft or polish something public facing most days of the week, thanks to the pressure of having a weekly blog and numerous creative and academic writing projects underway at all times.

Figure 2. My own BASE self-assessment these days

Doing the BASE exercise accomplishes two things. First, it draws your attention to the fact that the four axes exist at all: that the emotional, social, and behavioral aspects of writing should be part of how you view your work as a writer?. Second, it’s a way of diagnosing where you think your own writing craft can use further development. Since I also rated my behavioral habits lower despite writing frequently in the week, perhaps I should (ahem) prioritize only 1-2 projects at a time, in order to make more immediate progress on them.

Use the BASE tool to understand developing writers

So far, this is all Sword. But you can bring the BASE into your mentoring, too.

Let’s start here: Do you work with developing writers – students or others? Ask yourself what a students’ BASE might look like, compared with yours. This can be for a particular student, or for the typical student you’ve worked with over your career.

Here’s my comparison, thinking of a “typical student” in my grad writing mindset program:

Figure 3. A comparative reflection, illustrating what dimensions of writing growth need the most mentoring among students I work with

Right away, you’ll probably notice that your own writing BASE is bigger than the student’s (or to be more precise, than your estimate of the student’s). No surprise there – that’s why you’re mentoring them!

Similarly, if you look at Figure 3, you can see my understanding that students I support are, technically, not half-bad as writers (artisanal habits). However, they report that while they may complain and commiserate about writing angst, they avoid talking about their own writing with each other (poor social habits). It’s also no surprise that most students’ behavioral habits are pretty bad—psychology research tells us that humans avoid things that make us feel fear, shame, etc. And thus, it’s also no surprise that students’ emotional response to writing is quite negative.

Given academia, and science in particular, has a long history of not teaching students to write, this kind of BASE estimate for a student is unfortunate but predictable.

Match your mentoring to what the students need

So how do we use this insight to actually help writers?

This reflection forces you to think about mentoring writing as more than just correcting technical “errors”. Ask yourself this: is the mentorship you’re offering matched to your diagnosis of what your mentees need?

If I see that students are hampered by bad socio-emotional writing habits, but my mentorship is all about artisanal habits like polishing their text, I’m not really helping the way I want and need to.

Likewise, if you see a mismatch like this in your own mentorship, you can think about how to rectify it (hint: our new book, Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences is a great resource for that).

Next, you can get students directly involved.

We suggest doing this in two steps.

First, ask a student–or better, a group of students, such as in a weekly lab meeting or class–to complete the BASE exercise. [3] When a group is involved, they can next discuss their BASE results and how they feel about them.

We recommend you first ask them to discuss without you present, so they can talk without feeling judged.

Second, you can facilitate a follow-up conversation so that your experience can help students build on what they’ve discovered. In preparation, you can invite students to share their BASEs with you (being very clear that you won’t judge them for whatever their BASEs show!).

Now, you could make a 3-part graphic, with your own BASE, your estimate of your student’s BASE, and their own assessment of their BASE, side by side by side. This should spark a productive discussion of how a student perceives their need to improve as a writer, and how they might look to you and to other resources [4] for the tools to get them there.

There is no “correct” BASE

An effective and successful writer could indeed be stronger on one axis than the others. [5] Put another way, the BASE is not a grade; it is a reflection and development tool.

Letting students see your own BASE helps you acknowledge that you’ve also grown through experience but still have writing habits you’d like to improve. If you approach the matter with this kind of openness and empathy, exploring how the two student BASES differ can help bolster developing writers’ confidence while you together determine a plan for their writing growth.

By the way: if you’re doing this two-step exercise with a group, you’ll almost certainly see lots of variation among different student BASEs (so the three-panel graphic will have not one but several different student self-assessments). This is good! It’s valuable for developing writers to realize that while we all share writing challenges, we’re also all unique. Some of us have great behavioral habits but feel crushed by the act of writing; some are technically proficient but hate writing anyway; some love writing but rarely do it because of life circumstances or excessive self-judgement.

And, when two writers dig into their self-assessments, they’ll quickly realize that even if they both rated their behavioral habits at “2”, different behavioral struggles underlie their ratings.

This variability can seem discouraging at first – how can we find good advice if each of us is unique? But in the end, it’s empowering because knowing yourself, and finding techniques that work for you, is the key to growth as a writer. Once developing writers understand that, they can take big steps towards becoming independent writers.

How about you?

What does your BASE look like?

And, what other reflection and self-assessment tools do you already offer to developing writers to help you both understand what kind of mentoring will be most useful?

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© Stephen Heard and Bethann Garramon Merkle April 21, 2026.

This post is based on material from our new book, Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences, my research on improving graduate students’ mindsets about writing, and in part on writing mentorship workshops we both run – contact us to learn more about them.

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NOTES

[1] We’re not sure the word “habit” is quite a propos for all of these. Is technical skill a “habit”? Are emotions? But we’re picking nits; a bit of terminological clumsiness doesn’t detract from the value of the exercise.

[2] And if you want to compare, you can see Steve’s version of this post for his reflection about his BASE.

[3] Bethann and her collaborator Rick Fisher have learned, through a 5-year study to improve students’ mindsets and habits about writing, that the BASE can be a powerful tool for developing writers. They now lead a workshop on the BASE exercise in every iteration of their writing mindset/habits course. That’s what gave us the idea to suggest it to you.

[4] Starting, of course, with my co-author Steve’s book The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, but there’s much more out there that they can draw from.

[5] Sword has even published a book-length study illustrating the wide variation in writing habits of successful academics.