Building Science Editing and Proofreading Services

Condensation and mold turn up inside an exterior wall on the north elevation, four years after the building was finished. The report concludes that the assembly failed due to moisture intrusion, and stops there. The owner reads that and blames the contractor for workmanship, the contractor blames the architect's detail, and the architect points to a change the owner approved during construction to save money on a vapor barrier upgrade. All three may be right about a contributing factor, and a finding that names none of them has given each party something to use against the other two.

The documents we edit for Building Science

Building envelope failure diagnoses and root cause reports are most of what building science consultants send us. Moisture and condensation investigation findings come with them, along with remediation scope documents and the responsibility disclosures inside them. Correspondence comes with them as well, the letter explaining a diagnostic finding to an owner deciding what to repair and in what order. Our editors work on the sentence that has to name the mechanism.

What the editing involves

The specific mechanism is what a diagnosis exists to identify, and the failure is a conclusion broad enough that a design error, an installation error, and a material defect are all equally consistent with it. A conclusion of "moisture intrusion" describes an outcome rather than a cause, and a report that stops there has established that something went wrong without establishing what. The alternatives read very differently: a vapor barrier improperly lapped at one location, a wall detail that included no drainage plane, or a sealant used outside its rated temperature range. Those three findings require different remediation and involve different responsible parties, which is why the level of detail is not a matter of style.

Any change made during construction that could have contributed belongs in the report by name. A detail that would have performed as originally specified, but was substituted to reduce cost and never reviewed again, is a different finding from a detail that was wrong on the drawings. Both are recoverable positions for somebody, and neither is recoverable if the report does not distinguish them. The evidence for the identified mechanism should appear alongside it, including moisture readings with their locations and dates, thermal images taken at 6 a.m. before solar gain, and what was found in each exploratory opening.

Where more than one factor plausibly contributed, each should be stated separately with its likely relative weight rather than blended into a single summary cause. Remediation aimed at the largest contributor while a secondary one goes unaddressed tends to leave the problem in place, and the second failure then gets blamed on the repair rather than the diagnosis. When an owner asks in writing what caused the failure, a reply repeating "failure due to moisture intrusion" has answered nothing, and the mechanism itself is what the question was for. Reports written this way tell an owner what to fix and everyone else who is responsible for it.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including diagnostic data, findings, and client correspondence. We are editors, not building scientists, engineers, or forensic investigators, and we offer no opinion on causation, failure mechanisms, or responsibility. What we can do is make the report name the mechanism rather than the outcome.