Commercial Construction Editing and Proofreading Services

An RFI goes out on Monday. It comes back on Thursday with an answer to a question nobody asked, and a new question attached. By the time the third round closes, eleven working days have gone, the follow-on trade has been stood down, and the delay is now somebody's claim. The information was always available. The question was not answerable in one pass.

We edit what commercial contractors and their teams produce — requests for information and their responses, technical queries and clarification requests, submittals and approval requests, early warning and notification correspondence, method statements and construction proposals, programme narratives and sequence explanations, subcontractor instructions and briefings, quality and inspection documentation, handover and close-out documentation, meeting agendas and follow-up correspondence, and client and consultant reporting. Our editors work on the question that has to be answerable once.

The request for information is the highest-volume document on a commercial project and the least edited, and its failure is asking a question without giving the answerer what they need to close it. A designer receiving "please clarify the detail at grid line 12" has to find the drawing, work out which of four conditions is meant, guess what has been built, and then answer in a way that will probably prompt a second question. We work through these so the RFI states the specific location, the drawing and revision it refers to, and the dimension or element in question, since half of all second rounds are caused by ambiguity about which thing is being asked about; so the site condition as found is described, with what has already been built, because an answer that assumes a clean start is an answer that cannot be used; so the question is closed rather than open — a proposal to confirm or reject beats a request for guidance, and a proposal with a sketch beats both; so the consequence and the date the answer is needed is stated with what the constraint actually is, given that "urgent" appears on every RFI and a named trade arriving on the fourteenth does not; so any option that would work is offered, as designers answer faster when the answer is a choice; and so one RFI asks about one thing. Projects run this way close their RFIs in three days rather than eleven.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including drawings, correspondence and project information. We are editors rather than designers, engineers or contract advisers, and we offer no view on technical matters, entitlement or programme. What we can do is make the question closable in one pass.