Chemicals Editing and Proofreading Services

A customer's process fails and they send you the datasheet with a viscosity figure circled. The figure was a typical value — the average of the last eighteen months of production — and the material they received was within specification and at the low end. Nobody misled anybody. The document simply did not distinguish between what the product usually is and what you promise it will be.

We edit what chemical manufacturers and formulators produce — product specifications and their limits, technical datasheets and typical value tables, certificates of analysis and their presentation, technical service notes and application guidance, product change and reformulation notifications, storage, shelf life and handling documentation, sampling and retest documentation, customer complaint and investigation responses, formulation and compatibility guidance, regulatory and registration documentation, and product literature for distributors. Our editors work on the difference between a typical value and a promise.

The specification and the datasheet are two documents with two jobs, and most trouble in this industry comes from customers using the second as if it were the first. A datasheet exists to help someone decide whether a product suits them; a specification exists to define what they are entitled to receive. We work through these so every number is labelled as a specification limit, a typical value or an information-only figure, and the three are visually separated rather than sharing a table, since a customer's engineer will design around whichever number is in front of them; so specification limits are stated with the test method and its version, because a viscosity by one method and by another are different numbers and the argument is always about method; so typical values carry the period and the number of batches they represent, given that a typical value from eighteen months of production and one from a development batch are not the same claim; so any parameter that is measured but not controlled is identified as such, as this is exactly the category customers assume is guaranteed; so the effect of storage and age on each key property is stated, since a product at the end of its shelf life may be in specification and behave differently; so the tolerance a customer should design for is stated explicitly; and so a change to the specification is notified as a change rather than appearing in a new datasheet revision. Documents written this way prevent the complaint rather than answering it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including specifications, formulations and customer information. We are editors rather than chemists or regulatory advisers, and we offer no view on specifications, test methods or product performance. What we can do is stop a typical value being read as a promise.