Water Utilities Editing and Proofreading Services

Every year a water company sends its customers a report saying the water is safe. It is almost always true and it is almost never read, because the document is a table of parameters against limits, expressed in micrograms per litre, produced to satisfy a requirement rather than to inform anybody. Then something happens in one zone, and the same customers go looking for exactly this information and cannot understand a word of it.

We edit what water companies and utilities produce — annual water quality reports and zone-level summaries, sampling and exceedance reporting, water quality incident notifications and boil water advice, supply interruption and pressure communications, hardness, taste and discolouration explanations, lead pipe and plumbosolvency communications, tariff and metering information, leakage and consumption messaging, wastewater and storm overflow reporting, catchment and abstraction documentation, developer and connection guidance, and consultation material on prices and service. Our editors work on the report customers turn to when they are worried.

The water quality report is the document that has to work both as routine reassurance and as the reference point during an incident, and it fails by presenting compliance rather than meaning. A parameter reported at 3.2 µg/l against a limit of 10 tells a reader nothing about whether that is unusual, whether it has changed, or whether it matters. We work through these so results are reported for the reader's own supply zone with the zone identified in terms they can recognise, since a table covering an entire operating region does not answer the question anybody has; so each parameter that customers actually ask about — hardness, chlorine, lead, nitrate, fluoride — carries a plain sentence about what it is and why it is present, rather than only a number; so any exceedance is reported prominently with what was done, how long it lasted and who was affected, because a report that buries the one interesting event loses the trust that carries the other three hundred results; so results are given with the range and the number of samples, given that a single mean conceals everything; so lead is addressed as a property-level issue with what the customer can do, as this is the one parameter where the pipe in their own house is usually the source; and so the language never implies certainty about water inside a private property that the company has not tested. Reports written this way are useful on the day something goes wrong.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including sampling data, incident records and customer communications. We are editors rather than water quality, public health or regulatory specialists, and we offer no view on results, compliance or safety. What we can do is make the report answer the question the customer came with.