How do you know you're a good (writing) mentor?

Here's a tool for helping you decide that for yourself.

My self-assessment of my writing mentorship, based on but adapting Helen Sword’s writing BASE tool

My co-author Steve recently told me about an interesting chat he had with a colleague a while back. Steve’s colleague described a common complaint among faculty members he knows. Faculty, that fellow said, receive draft manuscripts from their students, realize the drafts aren’t in great shape, realize it would take them hours and hours to make the drafts better (and in any case they aren’t sure how to do that without totally rewriting the text themselves)– and so the faculty give up (on the drafts, and at least implicitly, on the students).

Hearing this made Steve sad, and made me sad later, when Steve told me about it. But it didn’t really shock us, because as hard as writing is, mentoring (or teaching) writing is harder. That’s exactly why we wrote Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences)! And we’re absolutely sure that the faculty members Steve’s colleague was talking about don’t want to give up on those manuscripts; we’re even more sure they don’t want to give up on the students who wrote them. But if they do give up, there’s a big cost [1]—to the production of science, if good work goes unpublished; and to the skills of future scientists, if good students aren’t helped in their development as writers.

This made us think about Helen Sword’s “Writer’s BASE” again. Sword designed this as a tool for writers to reflect on their abilities at, and attitudes toward, writing, and we previously discussed how we recommend facilitating that. But today we are suggesting another use for it.

If you mentor or teach writers (and who among us doesn’t?), it’s useful to borrow Sword’s BASE to help you reflect on your abilities and attitudes towards mentoring. (It’s clumsy to keep saying “mentoring or teaching”, so we’re going to stop; when we use the word “mentoring” we’re including teaching. Good teaching is mentoring.)

Sword’s BASE exercise, in its original form, asks you to score yourself along four axes:

• Behavioral: how good (productive) are your everyday habits as a writer?

• Artisanal: how well developed are your skills as a writer?

• Social: how often you do talk (productively) with others about your writing, or theirs?

• Emotional: how do you feel (positively or negatively) about the task of writing?

The obvious extension is to score yourself along the same four axes, but not as a writer—as a mentor of writers. How productive are your habits as mentor? How skilled are you at it? How often do you discuss mentoring with others? And how does mentoring make you feel?

My own crack at this is the image above this post, but before you look at it too carefully, we suggest you go do the exercise for yourself. The tool is pretty slick—it will only take you a few moments.

So, what about us?

You can see Steve’s reflection here. And now, what follows here is me talking.

I was candid with myself (there’s no point doing the exercise any other way). On the artisanal/applied side of things, I score myself as “highly developed.” I used to do developmental editing for English as an Additional Language (a.k.a., EAL) writers, edit research briefs for an arm of the European Union, and edit community journalists at the newspaper where I worked. And now, I mentor loads of students on their own emotions and practices associated with academic writing, lead workshops on the same, and teach a writing-intensive course every year that involves students writing an average of 99 pages. [2] I also serve on graduate committees and co-author my own manuscripts with students or other early career scientists. I also trained in how to teach writing, through a Rhetoric and Composition graduate program. Between the book learning and my experience applying it, I’ve learned a few helpful things about how to support developing writers from the practical side.

For the social dimension, which asks how often I “engage with other people about [mentoring],” I scored myself at “as often as possible.” Between co-writing Teaching and Mentoring Writing in the Sciences (a 5+-year project that was top-of mind that whole time), leading workshops and talks on effective writing mentorship, conversations with colleagues, and writing about all that here, I talk about mentoring writing a lot.

Interestingly, Steve scored himself low on the emotional axis, because he dreads and avoids reading draft manuscripts. Me, though? I love providing feedback and edits on someone else’s writing! (Way harder to do that for myself, though!) Since at least my undergrad days, I’ve genuinely enjoyed helping someone else say what they mean to say. It is both fulfilling and quite a fun game to me. While some folks enjoy Sudoku and crosswords, gimme a draft manuscript looking for it’s actual thread and structure! Granted, helping someone develop a more effective next or final draft is time-consuming, and can be frustrating. I won’t claim it’s 100% thornless roses for me. So, when the BASE prompts, “When I think about my academic writing [mentorship], the emotions I feel are…” I marked myself “Mostly positive.”

As for the behavioral side of it all, I actually want to claim my writing mentorship habits are “excellent” but not “perfect in every way”—the two highest options on Sword’s scale. I recognize that self-assessing as excellent could be an act of hubris, so here’s why I think that’s more apt for me than “pretty good,” which is the next, lower option from Sword.

1. When mentoring writers directly: I doggedly follow the advice that I gleaned from my rhet/comp training, and that Steve and I have codified in our book. That is, I stick to a few comments per draft, and as much as possible, keep them on a theme. And I calibrate those comments to align with the actual stage of development of the draft, not the end-goal product. Said simply, if the draft is just in the idea stage, I do not line edit. In such a case, I only comment on ideas and provide a suggestion about what to consider as the draft moves beyond ideas.

   
   

2. When coaching others to mentor developing writers: I do my best to no longer avalanche colleagues who ask for advice about writing mentorship. This is something I learned the hard way, as I used to try to download to them everything I learned on the ground and from the books. Reader, no surprise: they glazed over and definitely didn’t try any of the tips I offered. Now, I start by asking them questions back. What are they trying to accomplish? How perfect does the writing actually need to be to support the student’s learning? How much does the assignment/writing task affect a student’s grade or degree/career progression? How much revision can the faculty member/instructor/mentor support this term? Will other people contribute to an eventual polishing of the task? Then, I calibrate my advice to what they are actually looking for.

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So, we claimed at the top that doing the mentoring version of the BASE exercise is useful. How? Well, the obvious way is that it helps diagnose what you can focus on, if you want to get better. Do you have a lower social score than you’d like? That’s an opportunity to find help! Do you have a lower artisanal score than you’d like? That suggests you could get a lot out of Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences. And so on.

But we think the really useful part comes one step back. We’re often asked what’s the single most important thing an early-career writer can do to improve. Our answer: start to think about writing as a skill that one can deliberately work to improve! [4] 

And so what’s the single most important thing a scientist can do to get better at mentoring writing? Simple: start to think about mentoring as a skill that one can deliberately work to improve. What the mentoring BASE exercise can do, we think, is force help someone to reach that realization. And then, you can harness some of the many tools** and trainings that are out there to enable you to get better at mentoring writing with less time and effort. Wouldn’t we all like to manage that!?

How about you?

How does your mentoring BASE compare to ours? [4] We’d love to hear about that in the comments or just hit reply to the email that notified you of this post!

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NOTES

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

[1] As always, all em dashes, typos, turns of phrase, and ideas are human-generated here at School of Good Trouble. No AI was used, period.

[2] As I’ve mentioned previously, students write these massive page counts willingly. I don’t set minimum word or page limits for them. See previous reflections I’ve shared about this course for more detail, or see my syllabus for this course for more insight into why students pursue this much writing of their own volition.

[3] On Steve’s post, he has a footnote about how he was conditioned to mostly think “of writing as something I would do, more or less automatically, once the “real science” was done.” This was incontrast to him recognizing that he “could learn to do statistics better, learn to identify insects better, learn to pipette better but didn’t think the same about writing.” As I’ve discussed here numerous times, and as we detail in our book, Steve and I had very different training as developing writers. Since at least college, and maybe earlier, I’ve understood that getting better at writing was a skillset and practice thing. That comes from my affinity for reading and writing, which was then harnessed and coached in English literature, creative writing, rhet/comp, and numerous other humanities courses in undergrad and grad school. As I analyze at length here , recognizing writing as the work is categorically not how we teach science—but it should be.

[4] By compare, we do not mean to foster a competition. As we discussed in detail in our post describing how to foster student reflection using the BASE, there is no “correct” BASE for writing or for mentoring writing. Just as we all write in our own style and voice, we also have our own approaches to mentoring. So long as we are meaningfully supporting students as the develop their writing skills--without totally burning ourselves out or otherwise coming to resent or avoid the work—we are on track for writing mentorship that can make a difference. (And if you really want to know how we think you can gauge if you’re doing a good job as a writing mentor, we give you a checklist in the Afterword of our book!)