Standards Development Organizations Editing and Proofreading Services

A technical committee publishes a revised standard containing the requirement that guarding shall be provided where a hazard exists. Two national laboratories testing the same machine reach opposite conclusions, because one reads the clause as requiring a physical barrier and the other accepts a light curtain. Both readings are defensible from the text. The committee spends eighteen months issuing an interpretation that the drafting could have settled in a sentence, while manufacturers hold product back from two markets.

We edit what standards development organisations produce — draft standards and revision working documents, requirement clauses and conformity criteria, scope and normative reference statements, definitions and terminology sections, committee ballots, comment resolution records and dispositions, interpretation requests and formal responses, technical reports and guidance documents, and public review notices and stakeholder consultation materials. Our editors work on the clause two laboratories have to read the same way.

The requirement clause is applied by testers and regulators who never met the committee, and its failure is language a competent reader can satisfy in two incompatible ways. We work through these so a requirement states the outcome to be achieved with the criterion by which it is judged, rather than naming a means that some readers take as mandatory and others as an example, since guarding shall be provided leaves each laboratory to supply its own idea of what counts; so shall, should and may are used consistently against their defined meanings throughout the document, given that a single may in a clause otherwise written in shall language will be read as an exemption; so every term carrying technical weight is defined in the standard's own definitions section rather than assumed from ordinary usage, because words like accessible, adjacent and normal use decide conformity and mean different things in different industries; so each requirement is written so that its conformity can be demonstrated by a stated test, measurement or documented check, since a requirement with no route to demonstration cannot be applied consistently by anyone; and so where a clause changed from the previous edition, the change and its intent are recorded in the disposition of comments, given that implementers read a revised clause against the old one and infer meaning from what moved. Clauses written this way are read the same way in both laboratories.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including draft standards, committee records and consultation materials. We are editors rather than standards engineers, committee secretaries or technical experts, and we offer no view on technical requirements, conformity criteria or standards policy. What we can do is make sure a clause admits only the reading the committee agreed on.