An inspection ends in a document that someone who was not there has to act on. That is a harder writing problem than it looks. The reader is usually deciding under a deadline, often without the vocabulary to interpret a hedge, and frequently forwarding the document to people you have never met. A report that is technically complete and practically unreadable has failed at the only job it had.
This hub is about the craft of that document: what a finding is made of, how severity language holds its meaning from page four to page forty, which photographs belong in the report and which belong in your file, and what happens to the report after you send it.
It is the part of the job SightSpec is built around, which is why we write about it — and why the pages here are about writing, not about configuring a product.
How the subject breaks down
What a finding is made of
Location, observation, implication, recommendation — in an order that lets a reader stop as soon as they know enough to act.
Severity as a vocabulary
A severity scale is only worth having if one word means one thing across the whole document, and across every report you have ever sent.
Evidence
Photographs, measurements and readings are what turn a judgement into a record. Which ones belong in the report, how they are captioned, and what an uncaptioned photograph is worth.
Delivery and afterwards
Who reads the report besides your client, what it has to survive — a repair request, a negotiation, occasionally a dispute years later — and how it should be built to survive it.
What to take away
- The report is a communication document before it is a technical one.
- One severity vocabulary, used consistently, is worth more than a longer scale used loosely.
- A photograph without a caption is evidence nobody can use.
- Assume every sentence will be read by someone who was not your client, long after you wrote it.
Nothing is published on this topic yet
Answers appear here only once they have been researched, sourced against material we can cite, reviewed, and passed the checks we use before a page is allowed into a search index. Being written is not the same as being published, so this list stays empty until one clears that bar.
The overview above stands on its own — it is what we think is true about this subject, not a placeholder. Where to go next is below.
Common questions
What does this hub cover?
Report structure, finding and severity language, evidence and photography, and delivery — the craft of writing the document. It is not product documentation; where a page names a SightSpec feature, the feature is the example rather than the subject.
Does it tell me what my reports are required to contain?
No. What a report must contain is set by the standard you inspect under and by your jurisdiction, and we do not restate those rules here. Read the current text of your own standard before adopting anything you find on this site.