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How to Work with Writing Mentors

Module by: The Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication

Summary: This document defines writing mentors, describes how to work with writing mentors, and provides information about how to establish a writing mentor program in your course.

What are writing mentors?

Writing mentors are upper-level Rice undergraduate or graduate students who are trained and paid by your department or program to consult with other Rice students on their writing. Mentors engage in a dialogue with student clients, helping them understand the concepts and develop the skills they need to explore assignments, discover and formulate their own ideas, and generate original documents in their own words. Mentors do not give their student clients a voice; they help them find their own.

How can writing mentors help your students?

Writing mentors can help students at any stage of the writing process, including:

  • Helping the student understand the assignment, genre, or audience
  • Assisting the student in finding appropriate sources (in the library or in electronic databases)
  • Brainstorming ideas with the student
  • Reviewing a student’s plan for a document
  • Providing feedback on a draft
  • Evaluating a paper for a grade.

How are writing mentors typically integrated into a course?

If you arrange to have writing mentors work with your course, you have several options:

  • You may recommend that students meet with a mentor. Although this is the easiest option for an instructor to organize, students frequently do not realize they need help until the night before the assignment is due, when it is too late for students and mentors to coordinate consulting.
  • You may require students to meet with a mentor on the first draft of a series of drafts or assignments. Requiring a meeting ensures that consulting sessions are scheduled in advance of the due date. By mandating the meeting, you ensure that all students meet their mentor and become familiar with the process. After that, it is up to the students to initiate future consultations.
  • You may require students to meet with a mentor on multiple drafts or assignments. Although this option can benefit students, it can become costly in large classes or in courses requiring a significant amount of writing.

What information do mentors need from an instructor?

To best help their student clients, mentors must understand the assignment and its objective in the course. Ideally, these should be stated on a written assignment sheet and/or the course syllabus. Remember to include the following:

  • Due date (and penalty for late papers)
  • Word length
  • Source(s) that are required or not allowed
  • Audience for the document
  • Citation and bibliography formatting preferences, if any
  • Statement about whether any of the work may be done in teams or groups (writing mentors do not violate Honor Code rules about providing wording for written work)
  • Statement about the availability of writing mentors
  • Written evaluation form (or, at the very least, a list of assessment criteria).

How to Establish a Writing Mentor Program

How do you recruit and train mentors?

Writing mentors require training in consulting, providing feedback, and grading (if they will be doing that). The following steps will best prepare your writing mentors for their roles:

  1. Recruit mentors from students who excelled in writing in your course previously. If you have not assigned writing before, ask colleagues who teach similar courses if they can identify strong writers.
  2. Screen potential mentors by examining samples of their writing. You might further screen them by giving them a sample of student work and asking them what kind of feedback they would give. Do they recognize the problems you recognize? Is their feedback framed in a way that guides the writer to improve his/her own work (rather than simply evaluating it or correcting it)?
  3. Meet with the mentors and distribute each assignment and evaluation form. Talk them through your criteria. Allow them to ask questions. The better they understand your expectations, the better they will be able to help students meet them. If you have seen problems with writing in the past, identify those for the mentors.
  4. Discuss how to run a consulting session and how to provide high-quality feedback. See the Writing Mentors’ Manual for detailed information.
  5. If writing mentors will grade papers in your class, they should participate in a mock grading session using sample papers (for example, from a previous year) or be trained after the first assignment is submitted (if you do not have sample papers). More information about training sessions designed to standardize grading between multiple mentors is available in the Group Leader Training Materials.

Can you afford writing mentors?

Writing mentors enhance the learning experience for students and can help course instructors already saddled with heavy workloads, but employing mentors requires careful departmental or program budgeting. If you are considering integrating writing mentors into your course, the following numbers may be useful in estimating a budget (from the experience of the Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication, year 2007-08, in a limited number of classes):

  • Wages for undergraduate writing mentors average $10.50-$12 per hour; graduate students should be paid more (the Cain Project has not ever employed graduate student writing mentors)
  • If mentoring is optional, about 5-15% of students in a course choose to consult with a mentor if the instructor will be grading their work, whereas about 25-30% of students choose to consult with a mentor if the mentor will be grading their work
  • A trained mentor usually grades about two 2-page assignments per hour
  • Mentors should be paid for training as well as consulting and grading.

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