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In writing specifications for construction contracts, care must be taken to ensure consistency of requirements throughout and conformity with what is written in other documents.
This consistency can be promoted if one person drafts all the documents or, if parts are written by others, one person carefully reads through the whole finished set of
documents. An inconsistency in the documents can give rise to a major dispute under the contract, having a serious effect on its financial outcome.
• The layout and grouping of subjects should be logical. These need planning out beforehand.
• Requirements for each subject should be stated clearly, in logical order, and checked to see all aspects are covered.
• Language and punctuation should be checked to see they cannot give rise to ambiguity.
• Legal terms and phrases should not be used.
• To define obligations the words ‘shall’ or ‘must’ (not ‘should’ or ‘is to’, etc.) should be used.
• Quality must be precisely defined, not described as ‘best’, etc.
• Brevity should be sought by keeping to essential matters.
It is not easy to achieve an error-free specification. It is of considerable assistance to copy model clauses that, by use and modification over many previous contracts, have
proved satisfactory in their wording. Such model clauses can be held on computer files so they are easy to reproduce and modify to make relevant to the particular project in
hand. Copying whole texts from a previous specification which can result in contradictory requirements should not be adopted. Entirely new material is quite difficult to write and
will almost certainly require more than one attempt to get it satisfactory.