The Global-Local Dualism in Writing Center Studies
Jo Mackiewicz
Iowa State University
jomack@iastate.edu
Isabelle Thompson
Auburn University
isabelle.thompson1950@gmail.com
Abstract
We trace the history of the global-local dualism, noting how writing center researchers and practitioners have employed it. We next discuss problems and complications inherent in the dualism, such as the way it obscures the interconnectedness of text components. We illustrate our points with excerpts from writing center conferences. We end by discussing possible implications of our analysis for tutor training. Our goal is to provide a more nuanced understanding of this ubiquitous dualism in writing center studies.
Introduction
For decades, writing center practitioners and researchers have divided text components such as thesis and grammar into two groups: global and local. Various alternative terms have appeared. The terms “higher order concerns” and “lower order concerns” (Reigstad and McAndrew 11; refer also to Harris) have become particularly common in writing center studies. Writing center specialists adopted this global-local dualism to facilitate discussion of components of writing they wanted to prioritize at a given time, usually beginning with a text’s focus, development, and organization, and saving components such as punctuation, grammar, and word choice for last. For example, writing in 2002 about writing center tutors, Blau and Hall pointed out, “Tutors are consistently advised to … deal with higher-order concerns (HOCs) of focus, organization, and development before lower-order concerns (LOCs) of grammar and mechanics, no matter whom they are tutoring” (24). Because of its utility, the global-local dualism has become a common shorthand. However, in simplifying the writing process, the dualism obscures important connections among text elements, such as word choice and organization. We argue that tutor training should acknowledge the ways that meaning arises out from spelling, word choice, and punctuation.
In this article, we first sketch the history of the global-local dualism. We next discuss problems inherent in the dualism. We use excerpts of conference transcripts that we collected for prior studies to illustrate our points.[1] We end by discussing possible implications of our analysis for tutor training.
History of the Global-Local Dualism
The global-local dualism common in writing center research and training today stems from assessment practices, both in outside-of-the-classroom testing and in teachers’ responses and grading. Until the 1970s, many assessment methods did not include direct measurements of writing performance. However, in their discussion of the state of composition in the early 1960s, Braddock et al. advocated an “analytic method” (13) for scoring writing produced under controlled circumstances. Although it is currently criticized as “sterile” (Hamp-Lyons A2), the analytic method has influenced other forms of scoring in large-scale writing assessment by separating what came to be known as global concerns—central ideas and analysis, supporting material, and organization—from what came to be known as local concerns—diction, sentence style, grammar, and mechanics. Interestingly, even though grammar and mechanics received a smaller number of points in the assessment, Braddock et al. noticed that raters “permitted their impression of the grammar and the mechanics of the compositions to create a halo effect which suffuses their general rating” (19). In other words, the global-local dualism helped Braddock et al. think about and report on writing as bifurcated, enough so that they faulted raters who failed to accurately separate writers’ words from their ideas. For them, writing quality equated to the sum of an essay’s parts.
Further research about assessment conducted in the 1970s reflected similar scoring criteria. Diederich outlined eight “qualities” (ideas, organization, wording, flavor [style], usage, punctuation, spelling, and handwriting) rated on scales, with global concerns rated as more important than local concerns (54). In 1977, in two other well-known contributions to assessment, both Cooper and Lloyd-Jones described holistic assessment with rubrics that separated global from local concerns. From the beginning, rubrics have reinforced the hold of the global-local dualism in the minds of writing specialists. (The 2014 special issue of Assessing Writing discussed the merits of rubrics.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, writing specialists such as Murray and Elbow advised students to focus on global concerns during free writing. Murray and Elbow and a few others rejected grammar-focused, product-based research and pronouncements about writing that occurred before and to a large extent during the 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., Becker; Christensen; D’Angelo; Winterowd). They argued against the notion that teachers cannot help students with global concerns because that knowledge has already accrued in the writer’s mind. This view manifests in what Hairston referred to as the “Current Traditional Paradigm,” which held “that competent writers know what they are going to say before they begin to write” (78), whether from their own minds or from outside sources. Thus, writing instruction for followers of the Current Traditional Paradigm would focus on local issues.
In the mid-1970s and 1980s, however, process-based research became popular. For example, in discussing writing as problem solving, Flower and Hayes argued for brainstorming before editing for exactness and correctness. Similarly, Perl pointed out that less expert students’ “premature and rigid attempts to correct and edit their work truncate the flow of composing” (23). Bridwell said that “students who did a great deal of surface-level revising were mired in spelling and mechanical problems during drafting” (210). Hence, research about the composing process, in switching from the earlier product focus on local concerns to emphasize global concerns, adopted and promulgated the global-local dualism.
The global-local dualism has also played an implicit role in early research on writing teachers’ comments on students’ writing. For example, Sommers examined comments that 35 teachers wrote on first and second drafts and interviewed a sample of teachers and students. She studied the content of teachers’ between-lines and marginal comments–about local concerns–and essay-beginning, and essay-ending comments–what Connors and Lunsford later called “rhetorical concerns” (200). Sommers found that these comments appearing together can send mixed signals, encouraging students “to edit and develop, to condense and elaborate” and thus constituting a “remarkable contradiction” (151). In her analysis, Sommers employed the global-local dualism to argue for the importance of prioritizing suggestions about ideas over suggestions about punctuation. She argued that when teachers’ use “editing”-related comments, they encourage students “to see their writing as a series of parts—words, sentences, paragraphs—and not as a whole discourse” (151).
The global-local dualism entered the realm of writing center studies with the 1984 publication of Reigstad and McAndrew’s guide to training writing center tutors. They used the terms HOCs and LOCs in their third principle of tutoring writing: “Higher-order concerns come before lower-order concerns” (1). Reigstad and McAndrew delineated four HOCs: (1) thesis/focus; (2) appropriate voice or tone; (3) organization; and (4) development. In turn, they defined LOCs as “concerns that deal with units of sentence length or smaller. The emphasis shifts from the draft as a whole to sentence structure, punctuation, usage, and spelling” (18). Their goal, too, was to ensure a proper order of attention, cautioning: “Tutors may wait and treat LOCs at the end of the session or work on them during the revision of HOCs as long as this concern for less important kinds of problems does not shift the focus of revision from the much more significant HOCs. [Tutors] must be very careful not to become distracted by LOCs at the expense of HOCs” (18). Shortly afterwards, Harris used these terms in her book about writing conferences.
Subsequent writing center researchers have followed suit, employing the dualism—albeit with slightly varying terminology—as they attempted to quantify students’ outcomes after writing center interventions. For example, Niiler and Pleasant et al. used “global” and “local” as they studied the extent to which students’ essays improved after a writing center conference. Huang used the terms “macro-” and “micro-level” features to categorize text characteristics. In a meta-analysis summarizing the results of studies that investigated the effects of writing center visits on students’ outcomes (e.g., writing quality, grades, exam scores), Salazar labeled prior studies’ measurement targets as “higher-order” and “lower-order.” For example, Salazar characterized findings of Maize’s 1954 study not in terms of the Rinsland-Beck Natural Test of English Usage, the instrument that Maize used, but instead as higher-order and lower-order gains (88).
This history of bifurcating writing into global and local holds today in resources aimed at writing tutors and the directors who train them. The Purdue OWL, for example, instructs student writers to prioritize HOCs: “When you are revising your papers, not every element of your work should have equal priority. The most important parts of your paper, often called ‘Higher Order Concerns (HOCs),’ are the ‘big picture’ elements such as thesis or focus, audience and purpose, organization, and development.” The Writing Studio at Duke University differentiates between HOCs and LOCs and suggests that peer reviewers address HOCs first: “It can be helpful to use a system of Higher Order Concerns (HOCs) and Lower Order Concerns (LOCs) to plan your feedback strategy. For instance, there is little point in pointing out all the comma errors in a paper if the author’s central claim (thesis) isn’t working” (1). Similarly, the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan suggests that after a reviewer reads the entire paper, they should “identify the two or three most important ‘higher order’ things” that the writer could improve. The dualism, then, has pushed students—as writers and as tutors—to think about content as something distinct from the words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that comprise it.
Manuals for writing center tutors have followed the path set by Reigstad and McAndrew and Harris, dividing revision and feedback into two categories: global and local. Ryan and Zimmerelli, for example, claimed that “Revision consists of two stages: global revision—in which we improve the ‘big picture’ of our papers by looking at issues like content, organization, and tone—and sentence-level revision—in which we attend to the finer points of our writing by strengthening and clarifying sentences and correcting errors in grammar, punctuation, and mechanics” (9). Gillespie and Lerner cited Reigstad and McAndrew when suggesting that tutors attend to HOCs before LOCs: “One of the most important things you can do as a tutor is to deal first with what Thomas Reigstad and Donald MacAndrew [sic] call higher-order concerns. As a tutor, you’ll save grammar and correctness for later” (35). Thus, tutoring guides have employed the dualism to ensure that tutors avoid error correction and focus on developing students’ ability to formulate texts that effectively address specific rhetorical situations. The dualism, based on components of writing such as development and grammar, simplifies discussions about writing by allowing us to say “focus on this, not that” or, at least, “focus on this before that.”
This history, along with current practice, shows that the global-local dualism has been prevalent in writing center studies for many years and indicates its usefulness. Discussing instructional focus as local and global helped enable the 1970s shift from meaning as fully formed outside of writing to writing as discovery. Further, the accompanying advice to focus on global concerns helped writers see writing as recursive and revision as necessary. Overall, the global-local dualism has helped writing center researchers and practitioners to discuss writing as a complex system of behaviors that can be taught. That said, the dualism has shortcomings. In the section below, we discuss some conceptual and practical problems with the global-local dualism, drawing examples from excerpts of tutoring sessions we have recorded and transcribed for prior research.
Shortcomings of the Dualism
Because the local-global dualism divides components of writing, it obscures the interconnectedness of global concerns, such as text focus, and local concerns, such as sentence structure. For instance, seemingly simple clarifications of a single word can evolve into substantive discussions of ideas. In Excerpt 1 below—the first excerpt from our previously gathered conference data—Tamara[2] asked a pumping question aimed to get the student to articulate what she meant by the term “fantasize disorder.” The tutor’s goal, it seems, was to determine whether “fantasize” was indeed the best word to describe the disorder or whether “fantasizing” or “fantasized” might be better. The choice would depend on whether the student intended to convey the disorder was perceived by (fantasized by) the patient or whether the disorder was one characterized by fantasizing. In other words, the choice between “fantasized” and “fantasizing” involved a choice between two meanings:
Excerpt 1[3]
Tamara: Ok, you actually want ‘nor,’ sorry, instead of “or”. Um, and so “fantasize disorder”. What do you mean by “fantasize disorder”?
Sandy: Like I feel like people, um, sometimes don’t really understand that, how serious it is and like people really do not remember what the personalities do and like they really have no control. So like sometimes I feel like it’s just like they’re like, oh they just have different ways they act some days, you know. Hold on I just- Because then I’m going to end my evaluation. I was going to go say that I feel like because we’re supposed to talk about is this disorder going to be relevant in the years to come, and I said that, or I was thinking about saying, um something along the lines of that. I feel like the more people find out about the disorder the more people are going to try to fake it. So they’re like relevant. Because it only affects like, uh, one to three percent of the North American population and then in other parts of the world it’s like point five to zero percent.
Tamara: Oh wow, ok. Um, yeah ok, well maybe let’s- That’s not right or wrong. It just kind of jumps out me because it’s like ‘fantasized’-
Sandy: Should I use a different describe- descriptor?
Tamara: Seems like, um- Let me see what your next sentence is. ‘Fantasizing,’ you know, it kind of seems like, yeah, it’s just not real for anyone, but obviously it was for Sybil, right?
Sandy: Mmhm.
Tamara used a pumping question to get the student to explain the disorder so that she could then ascertain the term’s appropriateness. In explaining the term, however, Sandy expanded the conversation beyond one odd-sounding term into productive talk about potential content for the paper. Discussion of what is supposed to be a lower-level concern—word choice—led to the so-called higher level of planning text development.
This interconnectedness of global and local concerns is something Denny noted in her dissertation on “oral revision.”[4] In her study, Denny (“The Discourse”) used Reigstad and McAndrew’s delineation of HOCs and LOCs to operationalize tutors’ and students’ talk about potential revisions.[5] In doing so, she noted that in trying to separate HOCs from LOCs, the line between the two at times became blurry:
Further, many of these categories overlap in some ways. For example, in the Alyssa transcript, the pair was attempting to rewrite the thesis statement (possibly categorized as thesis/topic) by discussing specific word choice (possibly categorized as usage) to aid in organizing the entire paper (possibly categorized as organization). In cases such as these, I was forced to make a judgment call and code the episode for what I thought to be the “main” idea of the episode (149). Denny’s honest explication of her research procedure revealed the complex interconnectedness behind the dualism’s supposed simplicity.
Other researchers and practitioners have pointed out this interconnectedness. Raymond and Quinn, comparing writing center tutees’ priorities for their conferences with tutors’ priorities, acknowledged that “improving a local concern such as grammar is not, by any means, mutually exclusive with addressing a writer’s thought processes” (73). Similarly, in their tutoring guide, Fitzgerald and Ianetta noted that “sometimes global and sentence-level issues are so deeply interrelated that it is difficult to separate them. For instance, you might come across a sentence in which a writer has difficulty clearly articulating an idea but that, if revised, could help readers understand the entire argument of the piece” (74). Such researchers and practitioners have tried to convey the dualism’s oversimplification of revision and, consequently, feedback.
In a striking departure from the dualism in 2005, Kavadlo addressed the bifurcation of HOCs and LOCs: “HOCs and LOCs are frequently correlations, not chains of being” (221). Arguing in favor of addressing style in writing center conferences, Kavadlo pointed out that repetition, a supposed LOC, can mask lack of support for claims, an HOC. Further, transitions stem in part from conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, and introductory clauses, and audience appropriateness arises from jargon, inflammatory language, and slang (222). In other words, Kavadlo convincingly argued that the two intertwine and thus, the practice of addressing LOCs after HOCs can lead to “ignoring language entirely” even though language shapes the author’s main point (223). Indeed, he contended, mistakes such as comma splices “frequently show a student who is struggling to weigh and measure contrasting or contradictory—yet sophisticated and significant—ideas” (224). As Kavadlo explained, while the global-local dualism provides a useful shorthand, it obscures the relationships among text components.
Building on their prior work on L2 students in the writing center, Severino and Cogie made the same point but focused specifically on the shortcomings of the dualism in discussions of second and foreign language learners in the writing center: “The line between HOCs and LOCs becomes so blurred it is hard to distinguish them from one another. Especially in lower proficiency second (and first) language writing, supposedly lower-level language problems can so impede communication and comprehension that they therefore affect the higher levels of focus, purpose, content, and argument” (462). Severino and Cogie pointed to Blau and Hall’s critique of the HOC/LOC dualism, particularly in relation to second-language writers: “Blau and Hall expressed for the first time in print what many second language writers already knew and what many tutors had already discovered – that language for many NNS writers IS a Higher Order Concern” (464). Indeed, Blau and Hall went on to call the tendency to reduce writing to HOCs and LOCs “troublesome” (43, note 1).
Nakamaru, too, pointed out the main problem that arises when discouraging tutors from attending to LOCs—associated with proofreading—in conferences with L2 writers: “This general admonishment against editing and proofreading papers has been applied to sessions with L2 writers as well, despite the fact that L2 writers’ language concerns are very different from L1 writers’ and are much more likely to affect meaning-making than merely editing or proofreading needs” (98). In her small-scale study, Nakamaru found that “the tutors characterized the feedback they provided in the session in terms of ‘content’ and ‘grammar,’ almost completely failing to articulate the lexical needs of the students. This orientation may be the result of internalizing the ways writing center discourse in general treats students’ language needs” (110). The global-local dualism led tutors to see L2 students’ need for lexical help—help with the form and meaning of a word—as grammar and thus as areas to avoid for fear of appropriating students’ texts.
Indeed, as these writing studies researchers have indicated, word choices contribute to the meaning a text conveys, as Excerpt 2, a conversation between an English L1 tutor and an English L2 student, demonstrates. Tony began by reading aloud Sheng’s thesis—that imperialism and colonialism are unhealthy ideologies. Then Tony repeated what Sheng had written, but this time he provided potential wording, exchanging “ideologies” for “social structures”:
Excerpt 2
Tony: That is what we’re working on. Um- [Clears throat] Oh yeah. So you’re basically wanting to say that- “Imperialism and colonialism are unhealthy ideologies.”
Sheng: Yeah.
Tony: So some of the- I mean, that’s pretty simple, right? “Imperialism and colonialism are unhealthy ideologies,” or ‘unhealthy social structures.’
Sheng: Oh, I like that. Um-
This change alone—a change to the student’s main point—redirected the student’s paper from a focus on imperialism and colonialism as ideologies to a focus on them as systems for structuring a society. The tutor’s word choice suggestion, then, altered the overall direction of the student’s paper.
In addition, after Sheng affirmed that “social structures” was preferable to the original “ideologies,” Tony continued with a series of pumping questions, intended, it seems, to push Sheng to elaborate on what a particular word—“unhealthy”—might mean:
Excerpt 2 (continued)
Tony: And you can, you can even go into, like, why, or, like- What does it mean to be an ‘unhealthy social structure’? Because maybe your, uh, your reader might not know exactly what you mean by that. What do you mean by unhealthy? Like, it’s not good for the people? It’s not good for the country? It’s not good for the-
Sheng: Not good for people, I guess.
This excerpt shows how one word can play a strong role in conveying (or not) a student’s intended meaning. The tutor used pumping questions to help the student explain the word “unhealthy,” an explanation that could potentially frame the rest of the paper. Discussion of this word, then, became potential content for the paper. Moreover, articulating what “unhealthy” meant made it possible for Sheng to organize the paper around types of unhealthiness and the ways that colonialism and imperialism generate them. In sum, then, discussion of one word did substantial focusing and organizational work.
Despite the admonition that tutors should address global before local concerns, the fact remains that the two frequently intertwine in conversations about writing. In Excerpt 3, Tyra asked Steven a pumping question aimed at getting him to explain a sentence that ended with “colors and the need to dominate.” From that sentence-level focus, Steven panned out, moving to the text level of the teacher’s instruction to discuss ethos, pathos, and logos in the paper:
Excerpt 3
Tyra: “Colors and the need to dominate,” what does that mean?
Steven: It was one of the things, on- She gave us like a list, I don’t- I think it was online, I can’t remember.
Tyra: Ok.
Steven: No, it was in class. She pulled it up in class. It was like, different, um- I don’t even know how to describe it.
Tyra: Yeah.
Steven: Like, um. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like-
Tyra: Yeah that makes sense.
Steven: Ethos, pathos, and logos stuff though.
Tyra: Ok.
Steven: So, like, the need to dominate isn’t like, this is kind of the best lure that they have.
Later, after Steven attempted to explain the assignment, Tyra changed course to focus on punctuation, specifically, the addition of an Oxford comma. Immediately afterward, though, Tyra panned out again, asking a pumping question (“Why are they using these?”) that was certainly related to the sentence’s wording but also opened up the possibility of going beyond that single sentence to more fully answer the question:
Excerpt 3 (continued)
Tyra: Ok, that makes sense. So, what I would do is, add a comma here, um, so it’s like the Oxford comma so it’s like a list. And then I would say why are they using these? So, ‘They use ethos, color, and the need to dominate to, like, promote or advertise their product,’ or something like that.
Steven: Just at the end of that sentence?
Tyra: Yeah.
A few turns later, Tyra and Steven shifted focus back and forth again from punctuation to determining the meaning of “ethos” to punctuation yet again:
Excerpt 3 (continued)
Tyra: What is ethos, again?
Steven: It’s, um, oh man. I’m going to look it up.
Tyra: Ok.
Steven: It was the, um, uh, like, using a credible source I’m pretty sure.
Tyra: Ok, gotcha. So.
Steven: Yeah. It’s like persuasion with a credible source.
Tyra: Ok. And so the company is the credible source?
Steven: Yeah.
Tyra: Ok. Um.
Steven: It’s a- It’s a pretty popular fishing company, and they’re using Jacob Wheeler, he’s kind of, like, the number one fisherman. [Laughs] So it’s pretty credible.
Tyra: Ok. Um. So this is actually just going to go here.
Steven: Where at?
Tyra: Right here. And then you’ll end it with a period. It’s a little weird with the quotation kind of things.
After Steven responded to Tyra’s questions about the meaning of ethos (“What is ethos, again?”) and fishing company’s credibility (“And so the company is the credible source?”), both Tyra and Steven swung back to correct punctuation for in-text citations.
As these exchanges between Tyra and Steven make clear, talk about audience, purpose, and development is likely to unfold in conjunction with talk about punctuation and other local concerns. Tyra and Steven’s conversation exemplifies how it is possible to readily shift from one focus to another without a stumble.
Still another shortcoming of the global-local dualism is the inconsistency with which researchers have operationalized its bifurcated halves. For example, in their study of the effects of writing consultations on L2 students’ essays, Tiruchitampalam et al. operationalized HOCs as task fulfillment and organization and coherence (8), whereas Reigstad and McAndrew—as well as others who have followed Reigstad and McAndrew’s delineation—operationalized HOCs as thesis/focus, appropriate voice or tone, organization, and development (19). In short, although there is overlap, researchers vary somewhat in what they include as global components of writing.
Similarly, researchers differ in how they operationalize tone and style. Studying writing center tutors’ and students’ perceptions of help given and received, Winder et al. wrote that LOCs comprised “word choice, tone, style” (327). Pleasant et al. included “style, surface, and presentation” as LOCs (117). On the other hand, Reigstad and McAndrew classified “voice or tone” as an HOC (19). Similarly, van den Bos and Tan classified style as an HOC (8) and Strobl classified it as global (8). Such differences arose from the slipperiness of style and tone as concepts. As Kavadlo and others (e.g., Garza) have noted, style and tone arise out of choices made at the word, phrase, and sentence levels, and together those choices generate an overarching tone and style for the text. Another exchange between Tyra and Steven (Excerpt 4) shows how changes in word choice can contribute to changes in a text’s tone and style. Tyra suggested that Steven exchange “like” with “similar to”:
Excerpt 4
Tyra: Because I mean it’s obviously not my paper. “The color they’re promoting is like a forest green,” I would say, ‘similar to.’
Steven: [Laughs] Ok.
Tyra: And then it just makes it sound more formal. You don’t have to, I’m just being picky now.
Steven: Yeah.
Tyra suggested the change to “similar to” to elevate the paper’s tone, or register, rather than to correct a grammatical problem. Because tone and style lie at the boundary of the global-local dualism, researchers have differed in which side of the boundary they categorize them.
Conclusion
As we noted at the outset, our intent here is to show the embeddedness of the global-local dualism in the history of writing center studies and to exemplify the ways that the dualism falters. We want to conclude by describing how our analysis might manifest in training on providing feedback for teachers, tutors, and peer reviewers.
First, however, we want to underscore the dualism’s utility. As we discussed earlier, it became rooted in writing centers from assessment research and practice (e.g., Cooper; Lloyd-Jones). It then became a useful way to guide students’ focus at different points in the composing process. It helped students attune first to big-picture issues, such as main point, evidence for claims, and organization, and then to sentence- and word-level issues, such as punctuation and word choice. In other words, the dualism helped put into practice the findings of then-current research (e.g., Flower and Hayes; Perl) on the composing process. In this capacity, the global-local dualism facilitated the composing process for writing students.
But as we also discussed earlier, the dualism soon after migrated to discussions of effective tutoring and feedback, and in this capacity it began to show some limitations, as our analysis has attempted to illustrate. For instance, our analysis has clarified how the dualism fails to account for style and tone. Local choices at the word, phrase, and sentence levels create a pervasive textual style and tone. Indeed, in a recent study of students’ uptake of peer feedback, Abens et al. coded three categories of feedback: feedback on style, feedback on LOCs, and feedback on HOCs. Their choice acknowledged and rectified how prior research studies had differed in their treatment of style and tone—some treating them as an LOC and some as an HOC (refer to Reigstad and McAndrew; Strobl; van den Bos and Tan; Winder et al.). Thus, when we discuss the utility of the global-local dualism during training sessions, we might nuance our conversations, acknowledging the slipperiness of the characteristics that create style and tone. We could, for example, analyze the components of a formal tone in government documents, looking for words and phrases such as shall be deemed and let us always.
We might also, in those training sessions, consider how choices signal an author’s stance on their subject matter. We might analyze empirical research articles from STEM and social science fields for their use of high-value modal verbs (e.g., will) and low-value modal verbs (e.g., can) to understand how modal-verb choice generates an ethos of certainty or uncertainty within a results section versus a conclusion. In addition, we have all recently seen how using the spelling Kyiv instead of Kiev and using the name Ukraine instead of the Ukraine convey an author’s perspective. Similarly, authors show their understanding of history and support for marginalized groups when they employ terms such as enslaved people or escapees rather than slaves or runaways. Such localized choices reveal an author’s stance. Indeed, in writing this article, we considered whether to use the downgrader so-called when discussing LOCs and HOCs. This choice would have conveyed we fundamentally disagree with the notion that components of writing such as grammar and organization should be characterized as low and high.
Such training might also acknowledge the critical role that vocabulary (i.e., word choice) plays as writers revise their work. Research on L2 writing has made clear that vocabulary size correlates with writing performance (e.g., Engber; Johnson et al.); that is, L2 students who use words that appear less frequently in the language perform better on assessments of writing quality. More specifically in relation to the global-local dualism, writers—both L1 and L2—choose vocabulary based on their understanding of their audience’s background and their expertise in the subject matter. For example, a writer could use the high-frequency word house, but potential synonyms such as residence and dwelling signal a writer’s conceptualization of the discourse community. Similarly, vocabulary and even grammar choices can contribute to genre. For example, a writer who wants to develop a set of instructions considers the content—the steps—in terms of imperative-mood sentences.
In addition to examining how local-level choices create style, stance, audience, and genre, we might also consider how a given change in the text affects the text’s meaning. Meaning played a central role in the taxonomy of revision that Faigley and Witte suggested over 40 years ago and that numerous researchers from the 1980s onward have continued to use to operationalize revision and type of feedback (e.g., Bell; Berg; Cho and MacArthur; Min; Paulus et al.; Van Horne). Some revisions, Faigley and Witte noted, preserve meaning. Such was the case when a tutor suggested “controlling mother” instead of “controller mother”:
Excerpt 5
Tawia: Um, so her mom is, like, a control freak?
Sadia: Yeah.
Tawia: Like, she wants to control everything. [Laughs]
Sadia: Everything.
Tawia: Um. Ok, so I think you can just go by “controlling,” instead of “controller mother.”
Sadia: Mmhm.
The change from “controller” to “controlling” maintained the student’s meaning but corrected the form of the adjective.
But other changes, including local changes, do indeed affect meaning. Training discussions might then account for how a given change affects meaning on a word, sentence, or text level. We’ve seen how local choices can play a role in a text’s content, most notably through a text’s main claim, as Denny noted (“The Discourse,” 149) and as Excerpt 2 shows. Local choices also play a role in a text’s organization and cohesiveness, perhaps most notably via transitional words and phrases, such as Similarly, the second problem stems from and As we pointed out in chapter 2. Such words and phrases operate at a global level, tying one section to another or recalling content that appeared earlier in the text.
Conceptualizing writing in terms of the global-local dualism makes it easy to equate global changes with meaning changes and local changes with meaning-preserving changes, as Strobl’s research question exemplifies: “Is it true that peer-induced revision mainly focuses on surface-level, meaning-preserving changes, that is, LOCs?” (2). As we and others have shown, such associations don’t necessarily hold. In training sessions, it’s possible to consider how changes to individual words and phrases can change a text’s main point, style, stance, intended audience, and genre.
We’re certainly not the first to suggest that focusing on meaning could facilitate revision and feedback. Back in 1993, Harris and Silva reappropriated the terms “global” and “local” by associating them not with specific components of a text but instead with meaning. They wrote that global errors “interfere with the intended reader’s understanding of the text” (526). Thus, they wrote, a student who has written “Those students are boring” instead of “Those students are bored” has made a global rather than a local error (527). Similarly, Ritter associated global errors with meaning, as opposed to text components: “Global errors affect reading comprehension and can include word choice, relative clauses, and word order” (55).
What we’ve tried to accomplish here is to illuminate a dualism that we in writing center studies often rather unconsciously, yet quite readily, use and thus to clarify the ways that the dualism has guided and continues to guide our research and practice. We’ve suggested some ideas to nuance and supplement the dualism in tutor training on revision and feedback. Simplifications like the global-local dualism certainly have their place, but it’s important as well to help those becoming writing specialists to see beyond the either-or thinking that the dualism provokes.
Notes
We use excerpts from conference data collected with IRB permission from Iowa State University, Jo Mackiewicz’s university and from the University of Wisconsin-Superior, the university where the writing center conferences were recorded. Refer to Mackiewicz’s book Writing Center Talk over Time for more information about the data collection and transcription methods.
Throughout, we use names that begin with T for tutors and names that begin with S for student writers.
Appendix A contains our transcription conventions.
Denny published part of her dissertation study in the 2014 article “The Oral Writing-Revision Space: Identifying a New and Common Discourse Feature of Writing Center Consultations.”
She added format to their list of LOCs, however.
Appendix: Transcription Conventions
This study employed orthographic transcription. The following extralinguistic features were transcribed in addition to the spoken words:
Silent reading, with “reading silently” in brackets, as in [reading silently]
Occurrences of unintelligible talk, with “unclear” in brackets, as in [unclear]
Laughter, with “laughs” in brackets, as in [laughs]
Pauses longer than one second, with the number of seconds in brackets, as in [2s]
Pauses one second or less, with a comma
Rising intonation for an inquiry, with a question mark
Cut-off speech, with a hyphen
Reference to a word as a word, with double quotation marks, as in the following example:
S: I had “tell” but the computer wouldn’t let me do “tell.” It kept underlining it and saying “tells.”
Occurrences of overlapping talk, denoted with brackets as in the following exchange:
T: Ok. Alright. Well, thanks for coming by. I’ll give you your stuff back here. And I just keep this so I can put it in the computer. [So. But, um, you have a good day
S: [Uhhuh.
T: and I hope that it goes well for you.
Occurrences of reading aloud, with double quotation marks, as in the following example:
T: “For example, in the article, there is an example.” Uh, you could say…
Spoken written-language, with single quotation marks, as in the following example:
Like, ‘one character, Momma Gump,’ dot dot dot.
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