Today’s post looks at how the precision necessary in legal citations (in this case, from the comprehensive ALWD Guide to Legal Citation 7th Edition) also makes sense when it comes to technical documentation, as is more fully discussed over at the Printer Tech Support Blog with their posted article Getting the Most out of Legal Citations: ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, 7th Edition.
With an engineering focus at Shree Engineering, we get to document a lot of specifications, for processes, machinery and large scale mechanical assemblies. As such, we’re no strangers to the type of precision necessary to create both accurate and concise documents.
This piping number goes where, and what exactly is the definition of that valve exactly? It would be pretty embarrassing to forget to include some small detail in the process that gets repeated hours, weeks or months later.
As mentioned in Getting the Most of Legal Citations, the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation 7th Edition is all about accuracy and conciseness when it comes to referring to legal documents.
Like legal processes covered under law, in the engineering and sciences as well, there are certain accepted standards that must be met. A standard that has passed extensive review is the standard of giving the right number and type of pipe connector at the right time. To not be extremely precise in engineering is to risk non-compliance with standards that have been established for decades, even centuries.
It seems that the good folk at ALWD understand that, in their own way, there is a legal standard for the extensibility of precision in documenting the Law.
So, in an engineering sense, this is pretty clear. The same principles behind legal citations could be applied to the drafting of specifications, for instance. There is a need for consistency and thoroughness. We’ve reviewed some pretty poor examples of specifications before, and given the nature of our work, we end up seeing a great deal of engineering specifications.
We’ve seen mistakes in the handling of pipe sizes, incorrect numbering of assembly sheet numbers in manufacturing, and the overall error of making a change in one area of a process without ensuring that other areas of the process had updated assembly and manufacturing information.
Getting the Most out of Legal Citations goes into detail on this point noting that consistent formatting in legal documents is essential to ensure that the reader understands the meaning behind what they have read. This is a point that is taken to heart in the field of engineering and is commonly expected by mechanical engineers and engineers involved in assembly.
There is a process around documenting engineering specifications. At least, there should be, and this process can be thought of very similarly to citations in the law.
When it comes to documenting the specifications of individual components and assemblies in engineering we can think of the need for precision, the need to refer to items like piping and fittings correctly and with a standard in mind. The same kind of discipline can equally be applied to documentation of even greater assemblies or systems.
The parallel process is to take an assembly drill down to the next level of detail, the specific materials of the manufactured part. When it comes to describing pipe specifications, for example, there is a specific type of pipe in the drawing, but it can be manufactured from many different materials. Further, the manufacturing of the component achieves a certain state over time through corrosion, for example.
The need to consider the passage of time is important in engineering just as it is in law. To cite things precisely is to ensure that we have a precise record of what we are doing and what has been done.
The AMWD Guide 7th Edition to Legal Citation details this with astonishing accuracy and attention to detail. We will use the logic behind the cited citation to further illustrate the parallel between engineering documents and laws.
We’ve seen some astounding examples of formatting mistakes in the past. If you want to avoid this, you can bring the same discipline you’d find in getting the most out of legal citations to your engineering documentation requirements.
You can see a side by side example in the article itself. Ours is filled with “one inch “square brackets and capital letters,” says the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation 7th Ed., 13.7.
From the point of view of an engineer, it makes sense to provide the reader with the direct means to compare results later on to verify alignment with the specification. In this case, the side by side process allows for appropriate comparison, something we try to do every day at Shree Engineering.
What other references can we use to point elsewhere? We can include placeholders for information such as the plant where the manufacturing takes place. Or, we can include a link directly to the source of the documents located elsewhere in the system. For this type of corner case, it is useful to have a certain kind of flexibility. In some cases, you may not even be able to provide a technically similar source. This is another aspect of documenting the assembly that the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation 7th Edition describes.
In the case of engineering, we can bring the same kinds of advantages of the formatting used in citations to our own engineering methods. That is why we can recommend Getting the Most out of Legal Citations to all engineering and design professionals.