HOCs and LOCs
As we talked/will talk/are talking about in class, the kinds of issues we see in student writing can be spread out along a spectrum from “high” to “low.”1 This is not about importance, which is what a lot of people assume, but more about scope. The question is, how much of the paper might the writer have to rethink/rework/rewrite in order to address the issue?
Consider: if the prompt asks for a history of the Spanish Civil War, and the writer submits a recipe for lobster bisque, the revision the writer needs to do encompasses the whole essay. Something like following the prompt is a question that affects the whole essay, and the writer must think about the whole essay in order to answer it.
Something like organization, though, is a bit different. If a writer’s ideas are scattered, she might solve the problem by adding or deleting a few paragraphs, by moving paragraphs around, and so forth. In that case, she’s thinking in terms of paragraphs or sections—still large chunks of text, but not quite as big as the essay.
When we get down to things like spelling, grammar, or punctuation, even if there’s a pattern of error that affects the whole paper, for any given revision, the writer doesn’t need to think about more than a sentence—or, sometimes, a word. Whether or not “he gived” is grammatically correct doesn’t depend on anything else in the paper—or indeed anything outside of those quotation marks.
Higher-Order Concerns
When I talk about Higher-Order Concerns, I’m talking about things on the level of ideas, things that affect the content of the paper. Essay-level questions. Paragraph-level questions. “Big-picture” stuff.
This is the part where we look at what the paper’s about, how its ideas are organized, how the writer moves from one section to another, how the writer considers rhetorical phenomena like audience, purpose, and situation—ultimately, all the stuff that we like to talk about as writers and thinkers.
Lower-Order Concerns
When I talk about Lower-Order Concerns, I’m talking about the stuff that lives in smaller chunks of writing. This is the stuff we catch when proofreading or (shudder) line-editing. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, MLA style, in-text citation, and the like. If you can fix a problem by changing a sentence or less, it’s probably a Lower-Order Concern.
Again, this doesn’t mean that these things are less important—just that each individual example is more focused, more contained.
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This taxonomy is pretty common, but it comes to me by way of John Bean’s Engaging Ideas, 243-245.
Bean, John. Engaging Ideas. 1st ed, Jossey-Bass, 1996. ↩