Civil Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

A contractor on site has a drawing in one hand and a specification in the other, and they disagree. The drawing shows a 150 mm layer; the specification says 200 mm. It is Thursday, the plant is on hire, and somebody has to decide in the next twenty minutes. What happens next is determined entirely by whether the documents said, in advance, which of them wins.

We edit what civil engineering practices produce — drawing general notes and specification documents, design statements and design certificates, technical specifications and particular preambles, site investigation briefs and scopes, temporary works and construction sequence documentation, technical queries and their responses, design risk assessments and residual risk registers, drainage and infrastructure design reports, section agreements and adoption submissions, feasibility and options reports, technical submittals and approval documentation, and inspection, testing and handover documentation. Our editors work on the documents a contractor reads under time pressure.

The general notes on a drawing set are the most consequential text in civil engineering and receive the least editorial attention, having usually been copied from the last job. They govern how the whole set is read. We work through these so precedence between documents is stated explicitly — which governs where a drawing and a specification conflict, and where a written dimension and a scaled one disagree, because the alternative is a decision made by whoever is standing nearest; so the notes describe this project rather than the previous one, since a note referring to a superseded standard or an absent element tells a contractor the set has not been read; so anything left to the contractor is named as such — sequence, temporary works, means and methods — and anything not left to them is equally explicit; so residual risks that a designer could not eliminate are stated in the terms a site team uses rather than in the register's language, given that a risk communicated only in an appendix has not been communicated; so units, datum, coordinate system and levels are declared once and unambiguously; and so the revision status of every referenced document is fixed rather than left to whatever is current. Sets with notes written this way generate a fraction of the technical queries.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including drawings, specifications and project information. We are editors rather than civil engineers, and we offer no view on design, standards or construction methods. What we can do is remove the ambiguity that costs twenty minutes and an argument on a Thursday.