Mentoring Writing

These six characteristics of an effective writing mentor come from the book What a Writer Needs by Ralph Fletcher (Heinemann, 1993). However, the text that follows each bold-faced heading is an amalgam of Fletcher’s thoughts and my own.

A Mentor Has High Standards

An effective mentor has a mental picture of what a good piece of writing should be. At the same time the effective mentor has a realistic picture of where the writer actually is. The mentor cannot make a Pulitzer Prize winner out of a basic writer in a single sitting. Still, one needs a picture of what the eventual goal is over time. We can never be wholly satisfied with below standard work. The place to start is in the “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky). What does this writer seem to already understand about writing?

What is the next step for this particular writer? Where can you nudge him/her next to extend their understanding? The Vygotskian principle is that what the learner can do with assistance today, he/she can do alone tomorrow.

The Mentor Builds on Strengths

As mentors of student writers, we tend to start looking at a piece of writing as if we are on an error hunt.

Our “teacherly” impulse is to get in there and root out the mistakes. It’s a well-meaning impulse. But first, we need to look at what is already working. Like a good music teacher, the writing mentor has to learn to endure some bad melodies and shaky rhythms and acknowledge what the learner is already doing well and make the learner feel that he/she is making progress. A story is told of a man who wanted to teach his cat to chase mice. So whenever a mouse was around and the cat failed to give chase, the man hit the cat. Well, as the story goes, the cat never did learn to chase mice. It did learn, however, to run and hide whenever a mouse showed up. The same principle applies to mentoring writers. If all we do is point out is what the student can’t do, then he/she never starts to think of himself as a competent writer. We have to call attention to the progress being made and the things that are working before we attack the things that aren’t. Don’t overstate the good things, however; a false sense of competence sets them up for disappointment later.

A Mentor Values Originality and Diversity

Kids aren’t carbon copies of each other nor do we want them to be. In most types of writing, kids can and should develop their own voice. This is liberating to a beginning writer. They always seem to think they need to sound like someone else in their writing (the teacher? Shakespeare?). When we get them to trust their own voice and write as if they are speaking to a friend, we begin to make progress. As you mentor a young writer, and you are trying to get them to produce more detail or delve deeper into the topic, get them to talk it out first. Then just tell them: WRITE THAT DOWN. They’ll say, “Write what down?” and you say, “Just what you said.” Then make sure they do it, even if you have to remind them what they said or help them transcribe their speech into writing. The poet Leslie Norris said, “Writing is just talking to other people. You put it down on paper, but it’s still just talking.” Let’s help the kids discover their own original thoughts and voices. Of course, it’s true that many of our kids need to extend their voices into more acceptable forms. But let’s start with their own voice and then teach them to adjust that voice to suit the appropriate audience.

A Mentor Encourages Students to Take Risks

One reason beginning writers write so little is that they are trying to play it safe, but Bill Strong, the director of the Utah Writing Project used to say, “Playing it safe is playing it stupid.” Students subconsciously know that when they take risks, they are more likely to make mistakes. They don’t want to do that. However, that’s exactly what good learners have to do. A figure skater who is learning a new move is bound to fall many many times until he/she learns to do it. It is to be expected. Somehow in school, though, we have this notion that making errors is to be avoided at all costs. That’s a wrong notion. When it comes to writing, we ought to encourage errors in early drafts. It merely means the learner is trying to do things that he/she has not yet perfected. Of course, we don’t want errors to persist. But we can deal with those errors at the appropriate time.  First, we want to get them beyond their safe, dull writing routines. First build fluency, then work on correctness. 

A Mentor is Passionate

When you look back on the teachers you most looked up to, it wasn’t necessarily because they knew the most, or even because you remember everything they taught. Above everything we remember their passion, their excitement about what they taught. You’ve got to love writing to teach writing. One of the greatest feelings for you as a mentor is watching someone else start to enjoy what you love to do yourself. You want to give them a hug and welcome them to the club. I’ve always thought that the affective part of teaching and mentoring is more important than the cognitive part. If I can get a student to have fun with writing, then more than half the battle is won in teaching them how to be a better writer. Of course, all of this means that you might need to do a little more writing yourself in order to think of yourself as a writer. Otherwise, you’re just faking your enthusiasm. They won’t buy it.

A Mentor Looks at the Big Picture

Today may be a tough day for the writer you are mentoring. There will be other days. All writers have off days, get bored, get silly, get blocked, get lazy, etc. We need to be very understanding about that. On the other hand, all professional writers know that if you are looking for excuses not to write, you’ll always find one. So, we need to be sympathetic, but at the same time acknowledge that the only way for a writer to get words on the paper is to get the pencil moving. All writers, not just struggling writers, experience anxiety at times about writing. The mind is a hard beast to tame. It’s hard to settle down and get the ideas flowing productively. By dealing calmly with the struggling student we may be more likely to bring on the state of mind necessary for the ideas to flow. It is sometimes necessary to lower anxiety, not increase it, to get ideas going.

Another way we need to look at the big picture is to realize that significant improvement will take time. This is not an excuse for doing nothing, but as you help a student with his writing, don’t deal with everything all at once. Figure out what you can teach him/her today that won’t overwhelm.

Separate in your mind the difference between teaching the student and editing the paper. You can actually fix some errors for the student without making a teaching issue out of every one. Choose only one or two things on each sitting to teach. Pick the ones that the student seems ready to learn.