A mentor cares about the person who learns, and that means the mentor commends before criticizing, tries to understand the student's purposes, and directs comments toward helping the student succeed. Realizing that praise changes habits much more than nagging or condemning, a mentor may point out a place where a student made a decision correctly and then suggest that the student look for a couple of places where the decision went wrong and try to figure out why.

A mentor models the attitudes he or she wants others to imitate. It's all right to tell a student that you were disappointed in the work and that you hope he or she will do a better job next time. It's not all right to demean the student. However, you don't want to give a student the idea that a weak draft will earn a high grade; you can't take responsibility for the student's work, which must remain his or her own. So you want to be honest. Furthermore, when you grade the student's work, you must be free to award points without favoritism. Students should expect warm human beings with high standards in the scientific and engineering communities.

A mentor develops relationships through dialogs with student writers. Sometimes the dialog takes place through comments on papers or grading sheets, but these comments have to be fashioned with the main goal in mind: a helpful human connection. Here are points to remember:

In many courses, students must write a summary or critique of a published research article. Younger students often struggle to read journal articles and will seek your help as a more experienced reader and writer.

Before they read the article, tell them to make a short list of questions, issues, or concerns that caused them to seek the article in the first place. Those questions will function like "mental hooks" to snag connections as they read.

While they're reading the article, suggest that they

As they plan their papers, tell them to

When you consult, develop students' reading skills as follows:

Reading a scientific article is a complex task. The worst way to approach this task is to treat it like the reading of a textbook—reading from title to literature cited, digesting every word along the way without any gross assessment of the document, without reflection, without a critical eye. Rather, the reader should begin by skimming the article to identify its structure and features. Advise students to look for the author’s main points as they read. They should generate questions before, during, and after reading, and draw inferences from the article based on their own experiences and knowledge. And to really improve understanding and recall, readers should take notes as they read. These strategies, discussed in more detail below, will help students read, comprehend, and summarize their chosen articles.

Several researchers have tried to define "readability" as features of a text that enable readers to grasp the message or information quickly. However, the experience a reader has with the subject being discussed and his or her familiarity with the vocabulary and concepts affects how quickly and effectively the reader interprets a text. Indexes developed in the mid-twentieth century (such as the "fog index") focused on the number of words as well as the number of polysyllabic words per sentence. Today experts advise paying attention to the audience's level of expertise in choosing words and controlling sentence length. They also emphasize using sentences that put the agent (human, concrete, or abstract) into the subject and the action into the verb (with the object following) to make sentences easy to comprehend.

Consider the following example:

Original: In approaching the resin coated male dummies with larger claws and with raised claws (vs. claws in the resting position), a strong preference for the larger and raised claws was shown by female fiddler crabs in the study.

Revised: Female fiddler crabs that approached resin-coated male dummies in the study strongly preferred males with larger claws or raised claws over those with smaller or resting claws.

Linguists contend that readers expect writers to begin with concepts both readers and writers understand (the “given”) and then to add elaborating details or new information (the “new”). When writers break this contract by introducing new information that is not linked to shared understanding, the reader must hesitate, extrapolate or infer meanings, and risk misunderstanding.

Figure 1 was taken from a student paper in Introductory Biology at Rice University. In this paragraph, the writer discusses the primary finding of research on how the Hawaii amakihi bird persists in its habitat despite the introduction of infectious disease to the area. The arrows in the text demonstrate how "new" (later) information elaborates on already "given" (earlier) phrases.

Figure 1

Help students look for the pattern of "given" and "new" concepts in the articles they read. These patterns will help them understand how the argument is organized. If the pattern is broken, it will help them figure out why they are having difficulty following the authors.

Being a mentor is a little different from being a tutor. A tutor is someone who knows course material that a student does not know; it is assumed that a student who approaches a tutor "needs help"—that the student is unable in some way or finds difficult the task of learning the material in a course. A tutor teaches content that the professor has assigned for the session or that the tutor thinks would be helpful to students in that stage of the course. A mentor who is consulting, on the other hand, is an advisor and learning resource that a student can work with in the process of pursuing projects and assignments. Mentors share their student clients' enthusiasm and commitment to excellence in learning.

A consulting session is driven by the student's agenda or by the agenda that the student and his or her instructor have chosen for the session. The first part of every consulting session is a review of the student’s goals and a mutual definition of the session's purpose. In other words, the mentor provides the assistance requested based on his or her training and experience; the student carries out his or her work. The mentor does not take over a student's project, write papers, choose the actual words used, proofread papers, or earn the grade: those are the student's responsibilities.

These differences have important consequences in the session. It is the mentor's job to help the student perform for himself or herself the primary intellectual tasks of the assignment and to improve the process of scholarship—to suggest ways to think about the tasks, to point out tools, and to teach the student techniques the student needs to know. The mentor may go over similar papers or projects, talk about the processes used, and prompt the student to identify elements of an example that may be a guide for the student's own choices. But in every case the mentor makes these choices in order to achieve the objectives of the consulting session and separates his or her work as someone consulted by the student from the work the student is supposed to perform.

Abiding by the Rice University Honor Code is essential. The Honor Code forbids "aid," which includes supplying the content of a paper, specific words, or corrections—roughly the parallel to handing the student the answer on a test. When you consult with a student, you are not providing him or her with a paper to hand in. Rather, the mentor helps the student learn what he or she must do to write well—how to discover ideas, formulate a thesis, support ideas with evidence, organize, revise, and edit. The mentor might identify a problem in the student’s grammar and then advise him to look for other examples of that error so that he can correct multiple errors himself. Remember, a consultant must determine whether the assignment is one in which the student is allowed to consult a writing mentor before beginning the session.

Although some professional sports coaches are notorious for their callous and rude behavior, a writing mentor is a different kind of coach—someone who takes the following actions:

Remembering this acronym can make you a better mentor. It also will make you a better team member or leader in a research project.

Mentoring requires good interpersonal skills. As a mentor, you need to be sensitive to more than how much your client knows about the topic. Students often confide in consultants and mentors about stress, fears, and problems that are beyond the mentor's power of action. If someone has a serious problem, suggest talking to a college master or an advisor, or going to the University Counseling Center. The people at the Counseling Center are experts: what they do every day is evaluate people's situations and find help for them.

Students sometimes try to avoid acting in their best interests by playing a game psychologist Eric Berne refers to as "Why don't you? Yes BUT..." They tell you their problem. They remain in charge of the game by saying "Yes, but…" whenever you make a suggestion. So long as they come up with reasons why your suggestion won't work, they remain in charge of the game. To end the game and shift your position, you reply to the student: "That's really bad. What do you plan to do about it?" This reply puts YOU in charge, and then you can evaluate how well the student's suggestion is going to work OR suggest that the student discuss his or her plan with a counselor at the Counseling Center. Here is the reference you need:

Some writing texts advise you to include "the author's main points" in a summary. That may work well for other kinds of materials, but not so well for a scientific article. If you are writing a summary to show a professor that you read and understood a research article, you will need to answer the Twelve Essential Questions for Summarizing an Article.

Twelve Essential Questions for Summarizing an Article:

In most cases, some of these questions will be much more important than others. Every published article contributes to the scientific field in some unique way, and in summarizing you want to make that aspect of the article especially obvious.

Some of the possible reasons that an article is special:

Which of these possibilities (or others we left out) is the main reason the article you read is worthwhile? Your summary should make clear what aspect of a work makes it valuable. If the method, for example, is less complicated or more efficient than earlier methods, you should give enough detail about the method and its simplicity or efficiency to help the reader understand that aspect of the article. In that respect, the summary of a scientific article may not be a mere miniature of the larger article, but the answers to the principal questions above.

How much you say in answer to any one question will probably be determined by your purpose and the reason that article is valuable.

Steps for writing a summary:

Jagdt, Bjorn, Warncke, K. Auer, H., and Rudiger, H. Sleep deprivation does not induce sister chromatid exchange in humans. Mutation Research 361 (1996): 11-15.

"Sleep deprivation does not induce sister chromatid exchange in humans," a 1996 article in Mutation Research by Bjorn and others, confirms that using sister chromatid exchange (SCE) to measure genotoxic exposures in the workplace produces results within the range of normal daily variation for men and women who work night shifts as well as for ordinary daytime workers. A preliminary study by Bamezai and Kumar in 1992 reported dramatic increases of SCE after sleep deprivation. If confirmed, these results would have raised questions about whether SCE levels might be confounded when occupational medicine studies involved night shift workers.

Bjorn and his colleagues compared the SCE levels of 20 persons (10 men, 10 women). Individual baselines of SCE were estimated by the mean of the SCE per metaphase of two subsequent days (control period) and compared to that of a test period two weeks later after 24 hours without sleep. Daily questionnaires about sleep and dietary habits were used to eliminate possible influence of other factors. The rates differed slightly, but the differences were not statistically significant. Differences in conditions of cell cultures might explain differences in the two studies. Previous genotoxic exposures were assumed not to have elevated the mean baseline of individuals. Bjorn and colleagues concluded that the effect of sleep deprivation on SCE, if there is one, would be in the range of normal day-to-day variance, and does not have to be taken into account when SCE is used for genotoxic monitoring at workplaces.

Each assignment may have its own requirements for citations and bibliography. This section details the requirements for Introductory Biology at Rice University, which reflect the conventions of many bioscience journals.

References to works by three or more authors in the text should be abbreviated (Able et al 1986). When different groups of authors with the same first author and date occur, they should be cited thus (Able, Baker & Charles 1986; Able, David & Edwards 1986).

The references in the bibliography should be in alphabetical order with the journal name unabbreviated. The format for papers, entire books and chapters in books is as follows: