Writing a Procedure Someone Can Follow at Two in the Morning

The regulation sets the contents; the writing decides whether they work

Federal safety regulation is unusually specific about wording elsewhere, which shows what the difference looks like. Two OSHA standards make the contrast plainly.

OSHA's sign standard classifies accident prevention signs into danger signs for immediate danger, caution signs for potential hazards and unsafe practices, and safety instruction signs for general instructions. It fixes the colors for each. It also states that the wording of any sign should be easily read and concise, and should contain sufficient information to be easily understood. The wording should make a positive rather than a negative suggestion, and should be accurate in fact.²

The hazard communication standard goes further and removes the choice. A label on a shipped container must carry the product identifier, a signal word, hazard statements, pictograms, precautionary statements, and the responsible party's contact details. The wording must follow the standard's own appendix for each hazard class and category.³ The signal word is Danger or Warning. It is not a phrase the writer selects.

Read together, those three standards divide the work. Where the regulation supplies the wording, an editor checks conformance. Where it supplies only the contents, as the emergency action plan standard does, everything about whether the document functions is a writing decision.

The four faults that make a procedure unusable

Each of these is visible on the page, and none of them requires knowing the operation to spot. All four survive a reading by someone who has never done the job.

The first is instructions placed below the material they govern. A reader who has to scroll past a long list before learning what to do with it has already read the list wrongly. Instructions belong above the lists they apply to.

The second is a step that contains a decision without stating who makes it. "Notify the appropriate manager" is not a step. It is a question, and at two in the morning it is an unanswered one.

The third is conditional logic buried in prose. Four criteria, each with a threshold and an exception, are a table pretending to be a paragraph. The Plain Writing Act of 2010 defines plain writing as writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject and intended audience.⁴ Organization is doing most of the work in that definition.

The fourth is inconsistent naming. A door called the north exit in step three, the loading bay door in step seven, and Exit 4 on the floor plan is three doors to a reader who has never used it. Checking mechanical consistency and building the record of decided terms is copy editing as Editors Canada defines it, and it is the single highest-value pass on a procedure manual.⁵

Sequence is the property being edited

A procedure is not prose that happens to be numbered. Its order is a claim about what must happen before what, and reordering it changes what it says. That makes two habits worth adopting.

Every step should be the smallest unit that one person can complete and then stop. A step that contains three actions cannot be reported as partly done, and a reader interrupted halfway through it has no place to resume.

Every step should name its actor in the same form throughout. A manual that alternates between the operator, the technician, and you across forty steps has left the reader deciding which of them they are.

What an editor decides, and what the employer decides

An editor working on a procedure or a handbook reports what is inconsistent, what is out of order, and what is unnumbered. The same report names anything referring to a step or a form that does not exist, and anything that can be read two ways. Those are findings about the document.

Whether a step is the right step, whether a hazard is correctly classified, and whether a plan satisfies a regulator are determinations for the employer and its own safety, legal, and regulatory advisors. They arrive with the copy, and an editor who reversed one would have introduced a fault no later reading would catch. Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including manuals, incident records, and internal correspondence.

EditFast works on policy and procedure manuals and on safety guidelines to whatever specification a client supplies. Where a regulation fixes the wording, we check it against the regulation rather than improving it.