Global and Local Concerns

The most important concerns are global concerns, which are your paper’s ideas, development, and organization. When you receive tutoring at the Undergraduate Writing Center, your tutor will be sure to address these concerns first. Even if you requested only a quick grammar check or a focus on style, the tutor will care about your learning and your grades and might make suggestions about both the global and local concerns.  Local concerns of style, grammar, usage, and mechanics are important, but they are best considered after the ideas are developed and organized.

Your ideas should be clear, focused, and relevant to your audience. Your ideas should also be developed so they are fully explained and supported. Then you should focus on the organization of your main ideas to see if whole paragraphs in the paper and sentences within paragraphs are in logical order. Organization requires you to make coherent connections among ideas and to use transitions to ease the move from one idea to the next.