Standards Bodies and Consortia Editing and Proofreading Services

A specification is written to be implemented independently by parties who will never speak to each other, and its success is measured by whether their implementations interoperate. That is a far harder writing standard than clarity. A sentence that every working group member understands identically, because they were in the room when it was drafted, can still be read two ways by an engineer in another company two years later — and once both readings have shipped, the specification has failed regardless of how reasonable its wording seemed.

We edit what standards bodies, consortia and working groups produce — technical specifications and draft standards, requirements language and conformance clauses, test suites and certification criteria, interoperability profiles and implementation guides, liaison statements between organisations, working group charters and scope statements, process and governance documents, intellectual property and patent policy documents, public consultation responses and comment dispositions, press material and explanatory documents for non-specialist audiences, meeting minutes and decision records, and errata and maintenance releases. Our editors work with the conventions your organisation uses, and check that normative and informative material are never mixed within a paragraph.

Requirements language is where specifications succeed or fail, and it is remarkable how often a document defines its key words in section 2 and then abandons them by section 7. "Should" appears where "must" was meant, requirements are stated in the passive with no identified actor, and normative obligations appear inside examples and notes where implementers may reasonably disregard them. We go through specifications so that every normative statement names who must do what and under what condition, so that optional behaviour is genuinely optional and stated as such rather than as a polite instruction, so that conformance clauses list the requirements a claim of conformance actually covers, and so that anything informative is unambiguously marked. We also look for the requirement that cannot be tested, since a statement no test suite can evaluate is a statement implementers will satisfy differently and honestly.

Everything you send is treated confidentially, including drafts under member-only circulation and material ahead of publication. Whether you are a working group editor carrying a specification through ballot, a consortium preparing explanatory material for the public, or a contributor drafting in English as an additional language, we can make the text precise, consistent and implementable without altering its technical intent.