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?

Sorry, I'm Kind of New at This: A Resource for Training Tutors in Unfamiliar Scenarios

Training for Tough Tutorials is a resource created by the University of Richmond's Writing Center.  It consists of a series of videos that depict different outcomes for a number of tutorial situations that peer educators may run into.  Each scenario includes a video of the scenario and its different possible outcomes, scenario notes,  the paper that's being worked on in the scenario, and a downloadable question form that the peer educator can use to help gauge their understanding of the best response.

Scenarios covered include:

• The Nontraditional Student
• A Grammar Tutorial
• The Angry Writer
• The Fix-It Shop
• ESL Help
• The Reluctant Revisor
• A Strong Paper
• The "Bloody" Paper
• The Student-Athlete
• The Friend
• The Demoralized Writer
• The Offensive Paper
• "I Don't Get It!"

Overall, I believe that this is a great resource for peer tutors to work through as it not only shows them what different scenarios might look like but also shows stronger and weaker approaches to dealing with each situation.  The inclusion of a question form and the paper itself makes this a very comprehensive tutorial that may be great for helping tutors feel more comfortable in their ability to give advice in a variety of different scenarios.

Inside the Tutoring Kingdom

            Within biology, it is the task of the taxonomist to categorize different animals into their individual kingdom, phylum, class, genus, order, and species.  In doing so, it becomes simpler to tell both the big and small differences between two different animals.  In "Tutor Taxonomy", Scott L. Miller takes a similar approach in the writing center, grouping writing tutors into different "species" based on the characteristics and differences that they share in their tutoring philosophies.

            Miller describes two different varieties of tutors, which he calls P. taciturnus and P. rhetoricus.  According to Miller's observations, the P. taciturnus variety of tutor tends to ask questions more than offer direct advice. These tutors see their role as a supporter of their tutee with a job of gently questioning and probing the tutee towards understanding.  This tutor, "...embodies faith and trust, trust that the tutee is smart enough to work it out for himself ultimately, if not today" (102).

            P. rhetoricus tutors, on the other hand, are known for being more concerned about dispensing the knowledge that they have to the tutee.  These tutors tend to believe that there is a certain way that professors want things to be written and aren't afraid to share this information with their tutee.

            Miller supports these assertions by relating each of his species of tutors to different tutoring models.  P. taciturnus is shown in relation to the minimalist tutoring model while P. rhetoricus is linked to a social-constructionist model of writing. (103) The minimalist model is set up in such a way that the tutor's position is to help the tutee express the ideas that they already possess through a series of questions.  This type of tutor believes that the tutee already knows what they want to say, they simply need help expressing those thoughts in a manner that is both meaningful and convincing.  Miller also suggests that this model of tutoring may be adopted by tutors when they are unfamiliar with the rhetoric being used in the tutee's assignment.

            P. rhetoricus, Miller suggests, is based on a social-constructionist writing philosophy.  Miller notes that this type of tutor abides by the idea that a tutee may not know what they need to say because they may not yet be familiar enough with their field to understand how or why things are done a certain way.  This type of tutor, Miller says, would argue that we all have different voices that we develop and that, "...the voices we exercise come to us along with the various subjectivities we are required to or choose to adopt in life” (104). From this assertion, this type of writing tutor would argue that tutees must be taught what they should sound like.

            With such different philosophies, one may then question which method is "right".  Should a tutor attempt to ask more questions and guide his tutee in the way of P. taciturnus or is it in the best interest of the tutee to use an approach more resembling that of P. rhetoricus in which the role of the tutor is to directly instruct the tutee in how he should write?  Miller believes that neither of these methods is necessarily better than the other nor that one should abandon one vision for the other.  Instead, he goes so far as to say that the writing center needs both varieties of tutors.

Works Cited

Miller, Scott L. "Tutor Taxonomy." Pedagogy 5.1 (2005): 102-115. Academic Search Complete.

Questions for the Tutor

1. What type of tutor do you think you are?  Do you identify more closely with P. taciturnus or P. rhetoricus tutoring “species”? What ways do your tutoring techniques reflect this?
2. What are some strong points of each of these tutoring types?  What are some weak points?
3. How can developing characteristics of each of these types of tutors make you a more adept writing tutor?
4. In what context is the P. taciturnus  type of tutor appropriate?  The P. rhetoricus?  Do you think that the methods from each type can be blended together and in what ways?