What is a Local Perspective?
Local Perspective is a term used by teachers, editors, writers, and critics to refer to the practice of talking about a document or revising and editing a document at the word, phrase, clause, and sentence level.
The local perspective is often contrasted to the global perspective, which refers to a writer, speaker, knowledge worker’s efforts to address big-picture stuff such as whether the purpose of a text is clear.
The Local Perspective may be called
- the syntactic or grammatical or linguistic level
- the microstructural perspective
Why Does the Local Perspective Matter?
Local perspective–if you don’t engage in
The practice of engaging in a local perspective is an act of editing rather than an act of revision. When editors, bosses, or instructors critique a text from the local perspective, they are examining it sentence-by-sentence, looking for stylistic infelicities, i.e., errors of usage, convention.
Related Concepts
In Writing Studies,
