Local Perspective

To communicate and clearly, you need to be able to jump back and forth between a global perspective and a local perspective. While you may focus more time on adopting a global perspective early during composing, once you understand the assignment prompt or rhetorical challenge, once you've done the strategic research to take the pulse of a scholarly conversation on a topic, and once you've got a pretty solid draft, then you're ready to adopt a microstructural perspective.

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.

In Writing Studies,