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.

If a paper is disorganized, solving that problem will probably require moving paragraphs around. If a word is misspelled, though, that problem can probably be solved by moving letters around. So when we call language-level issues a “lower-order concern,” we don’t mean that they’re less important, but rather that they’re smaller in scope.

Note: I hate the metaphor I’m about to use, but it’s the thing my brain is doing, so bear with me.

A flea is also a small thing. And if a dog has a flea, that’s probably not a huge problem. I have two dogs, and it’s entirely possible that one of them has one flea, because they spend time outside. I might never notice it or know about it. They might never notice it or know about it.

However.

The thing about fleas is that you don’t usually get a flea. You usually get fleas. They are still small things individually, but once there’s a whole bunch of them, they have a very different kind of effect on the dog (and owner and furniture) as a group.

So it is with lower-order concerns. Each misspelling, each missing punctuation mark, each disagreement between subject and verb, each unclear antecedent is a small, individual thing. On their own, they may not be worth addressing. I’ve probably misspelled something in this handout; spellcheck is currently off and now I can’t turn it on because it would undermine my point. But once the same small, individual thing is repeated many times, it becomes a pattern.

If you’re quick enough, a flea is something you can catch with a brush, or with your fingers, and smush. But fleas you have to treat differently—take a higher-level approach. Correcting them all individually can’t work; instead, we look at how to address the issue on a systemic level.

This is the core idea behind patterns of error. Instead of looking at each individual grammatical error, citation mistake, misspelling, etc. as an issue to correct in an individual sentence, we ask ourselves whether they represent a pattern. Is this something that the writer does consistently? Do I see other examples of this issue in the paper? How common is it? Is it something I can explain? Is it something I can offer a strategy for revising?

When we work with language-level issues, our goal should not be to correct the specific examples—it should be to teach students tools to address the patterns we see in their writing.