Working with Global and Local Concerns

Working with Global and Local Concerns

            One big hurdle that tutors must often overcome is helping students understand the purpose of the tutor.  Rather than simply being an proofreader, it is the role of the tutor to help guide the student towards creating a strong paper that contains clear ideas, demonstrates the student's knowledge, meets the requirements of the assignment overall.

            Brad Hughes of the University of Wisconsin Writing Center notes that teachers and in this case peer tutors must be able to communicate with the student about different levels of revision.  Part of this means understanding the difference between global writing concerns and local writing concerns.

            Global writing concerns involve "whole-text issues such as ideas or content, focus, genre, argument, thesis, development, organization, clarity of purpose, and awareness of audience." (Hughes) When looking for global concerns, once should ask whether:

o   The draft effectively meets the assignment's requirements

o   The writer is demonstrating a good understanding of the information covered

o   The writer is making a strong argument about something important

o   The writer has clearly defined her points

o   These points are logically organized

o   These points are being sufficiently developed and explained

o   There is enough evidence to support the author's argument

o   The paragraphs themselves are well-developed and unified.

            Once global writing concerns have been met, it's time to look at local concerns.  This involves working on the improvement of sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation.  At this point questions may be asked concerning effective use of transitions, improvement of style, how word choice and sentence structure are affecting understanding for the audience, and whether there are grammatical, punctuation, or proofreading errors.

            While a good writer will understand the importance of working with global concerns before addressing local concerns, it can be difficult to convince a student that this is the right path to take.  Beth Barry, a composition professor at Texas Lutheran University, likes to use the analogy of renovating versus redecorating to help students understand why it is more important to address larger issues within a paper before moving onto smaller ones.

            We can think of the changes meant to address global concerns as renovations to the paper.  When renovating a house, this might involve things like tearing down a wall or repairing a cracked foundation.  These are large tasks that require a lot of work and sometimes even appear to be doing more harm than good.  However, for a safe and comfortable house to be built they must be done.  In the revising process, we might see renovations as things like completely changing a thesis statement or having to cut several paragraphs that do not adequately contribute to a paper’s meaning.  While it can be hard to make these big changes, making them will create a better paper in the long run. 

            Redecorating a house, on the other hand, might involve things like putting up new wallpaper or replacing a sofa’s pillows.  For a paper, this means looking at local concerns, such as making more considerations about word choice or taking a closer look at grammar and punctuation. 

            Taking these two processes together, it is clear that for a house we want to complete the renovations before thinking about redecorating.  It doesn’t make any sense to start painting the walls of your house if they aren’t even all up yet.  In the same way, it isn’t useful to start looking at smaller local concerns when there is still an abundance of global concerns that need to be addressed.  Once students can begin to understand this, it becomes easier to get them to focus on the larger issues within their papers instead of being preoccupied with surface issues.

Works Cited

Hughes, Brad. "Emphasizing The Right Thing At The Right Time: Differentiating Between Global and Local Concerns in Student Writing." Integrating Writing into Your Course. University of Wisconsin-Madison/Writing Across the Curriculum. Web. 

Questions for Tutors

1. What questions can a tutor ask a student to help them understand the global concerns that they should be looking for? For local concerns?
2. Why might it be important for a tutor to communicate the difference between global and local concerns to a student?
3. What can a tutor do to help a student focus more on global concerns when they seem to be more worried about local concerns?  How can a tutor help a student understand why global concerns need to be addressed first?