Triage is a word used in the field of emergency medicine to decide who to treat first. In an emergency room, for example, they do not treat people on a first-come, first-serve basis. They treat the person who needs the most critical care first. Someone having a heart attack will be seen before the person with a sprained ankle.
Luckily, in tutoring writing, you won’t need to make life or death decisions. Still, you will want to do “triage” when reviewing drafts because you have a limited amount of time with your writer, and you need to decide how to best use that time.
The first thing that should guide your decision is the agenda that you set with the writer. What did the writer want to work on? This is a good place to start. After this, if there is remaining time in your session, you might use a strategy used in many writing centers: HOCs before LOCs (said: “hocks and locks”).
HOCs are higher-order concerns. These are parts of the writing that affect the whole, such as the organization, argument/thesis, tone, and order of ideas. It is also a higher order concern whether or not the draft meets the assignment criteria and the audience expectations.
LOCs are lower-order concerns or later-order concerns. They are the issues in writing that are isolated to a sentence or brief section. Punctuation and spelling errors are often considered LOCs because they might be noticed by a reader but they do not affect the entire message of a text.
Many writing tutors use the HOCs before LOCs as a general rule because (1) you wouldn’t want to spend several minutes with a writer correcting small errors in a paragraph to later realize the writer wants to delete that whole paragraph because it doesn’t fit with the assignment, and (2) they want to emphasize with the writer that there is more to writing than correctness. The ideas, the message, the claims, and the evidence are crucial.
Look at this list of some possible writing concerns. Discuss with your team whether you see them typically as a HOC or a LOC.
Introduction
Supporting claims with evidence
Works Cited page
Commas
Missing words
Transitions
Flow
Using sources
A chart or graph
Formatting
The title
Verb tense
Length of paper