When I worked as a writing tutor in a college writing center, we made a distinction between what we called higher-order concerns and lower-order concerns in the student papers we saw. Higher-order concerns were all the fundamental non-sentence-level issues we identified.
They were the big-picture aspects of the paper—everything from weak/incoherent arguments to meandering organization. Sometimes, the paper simply did not fulfil the intended purpose of the assignment. At the writing center, we prioritized evaluating these aspects of the papers.
Invariably, however, students were most focused on lower-order concerns—grammar, spelling, punctuation, formatting, etc.—when they came in to see us. Part of our job was, with the student’s permission, drawing their attention to the higher-order concerns because a paper could be competently written, even well written, from a prose standpoint and still have significant problems. Many students were appreciative of the feedback, even though it wasn’t what they’d ever considered as a potential problem.
As an editor, I’ve found that my author clients tend to seek out feedback on higher-order concerns much more proactively than the students I tutored. However, it can still be a confusing process to navigate. This post talks about two of the most common ways that editors look at higher-order concerns in manuscripts—developmental editing and manuscript critiques.
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