IFA RO only as approved contractors

[kevin wooldridge]

There is nothing to stop anyone setting up as a sole trader in archaeology. True. But sole trader status doesn't necessarily guarantee you work. Also true. If we forget for a moment the RO issue and ask the question: Does a curator have the right to question the ability of an archaeological contractor to undertake a specific job...I would say 'Yes'. Does a curator have the right to throw an archaeological contractor off a job (assuming the contractor is in all other terms obeying the law of the land). I would say probably: No ... however the sting in the tail for any developer using an archaeological contractor who is not capable of achieving the brief or specification set by the curator is whether they are able to discharge the planning condition. Surely at the end of the day it is the developers duty to ensure that happens if they wish their development to go ahead. The curator in that sense is only there to make sure they have done as instructed to obtain their permission to develop....

[BAJR]

I again agree with Kevin.

The thing with a report, draft or not... is that if it is so full of spelling mistakes, grammar - but apart from that, I would send it back, say, fix the spelling and grammar and then send it back in again. apart from that I will pass it. Now, the next time I got a report from this contractor and it was again full of grammar and spelling, I would send it back without comment other than, I am not here as a spellchecker.

Every time it is sent back costs time and money for the contractor. so should ensure developer becomes either happy for a well done report, or unhappy for a poor report.

Explicit banning based on membership of IfA becomes a different issue.

[Martin Locock]

I think spelling and grammar is not a valid reason to request a contractor to amend a report. The brief and specification are about a project to investigate the archaeological resource, and unless they specify that the prose should be melodious and elegant then there are no valid reasons to object. If context numbers are confused or the meaning is unclear, fair enough.

Glamorgan-Gwent Archaeological Trust (of which I am trustee) has developed explicit guidance to contractors explaining the criteria which will be used to monitor the quality of their work and reports: http://www.ggat.org.uk/aps/english/monitoring.html and I think this is very healthy development.

[kevin wooldridge]

Thanks Martin....I agree. I particularly like that the GGAT documentation is positive towards achieving a result if a problem should be highlighted during a monitoring visit....

[Dinosaur]

Judging by a lot of the grey lit reports mouldering in HERs, spelling and grammar have never figured highly when curators have been deciding whether or not to accept a report.....

[Marcus Brody]

I think spelling and grammar is not a valid reason to request a contractor to amend a report.

Oh, I completely agree that the curator probably wouldn't be justified in refusing a report simply on the basis of poor spelling or grammar. However, I would expect them to mention it, to give the contractor the opportunity to amend it. Similarly, I'd expect the contractor to want any report going out under their name to be as good as possible, and correcting spelling and grammar is a very simple fix.

Like Dinosaur, I've seen a lot of grey lit reports that appear to either have been written by people with a fairly sketchy grasp of the English language, or who simply didn't care enough about it to bother proof-reading the thing before it was sent. Whenever I read one of these, I cringe that the contractor was prepared to put their name to such a poorly-written piece of work - I sometimes think that the curator probably passed it on the basis that if the contractor was happy to supply a document that made them look a bit stupid and careless, there's no reason to bother asking them to correct these errors as the only benefit would be to make the contractor look better.

The detail of the report may be clear, but a report that's riddled with basic mistakes gives such a poor impression of general standards of literacy in the archaeological profession. If I was a developer and had paid for a report that was badly written and full of basic spelling mistakes, I'm not sure how happy I'd be at such an apparently slipshod production. I don't expect every report to be a beautifully-crafted example of literary genius, but in an age where almost all reports will be composed on a word-processing package, there's very little excuse for basic spelling mistakes.

I do appreciate that this makes me sound like a right miserable old git! I don't know, kids today, blah, blah, blah

[loupiote]

I've always found that "clear" and "ridden with grammar and spelling mistakes" were incompatible notions... If I have to struggle to read something because it is very poorly written, it generally has a negative impact on my understanding. Which is probably why grammar and spelling rules exist in the first place. Sticking to them insures that a message is understood and that a reader doesn't wonder what on Earth the writer meant.

[BAJR]

Thank you Martin... great document.

The Grammar and spelling was always a sticky one. but I saw it as worth mentioning and would expect glaring erros sich as Romans was in in the are . Would make the report unreadbale and also sugggest that care had not been takn in the repurt itsself content.

Damn I sound like Unit of One now!

[Dinosaur]

I'm always fascinated when a curator goes out of their way to comment on the readability etc of a report, certainly suggests that a lot of the stuff they receive is below par - but then describing a load of postholes is probably not something they teach in English A-level.

The process here is in general that you write the thing, bung it at the management with some pics, it reappears an indeterminate time later with edits scribbled incomprehensibly in the margins (which are a whole separate learning-curve to decipher), or occasionally when you're first starting a personal managerial visitation to explain where you've gone horribly wrong, you do the edits, bang off a copy which gets perused by whoever is signing it off, get it back with a lot of mis-numbered paragraphs and formatting wierdness highlighted together with all the typos etc missed during all the previous stages, do lots of swearing, then a copy wings off as a draft to the client and the curator for comment, then the whole process again incorporating any comments from them (and taking the opportunity to spot all the typos etc missed by everyone previously), then issue the thing. Then about 3 years later whoever the land has subsequently been sold to comes back asking for the same eval, DBA or whatever again since the vendor neglected to pass on the original report, and you can surprise them by instantly emailing a copy by return (it's happened!). Luckily there seems to be a basic office culture of 'how do you spell this', 'can anyone think of a better/different way of saying this' etc, and people at all levels aren't shy about asking if anyone knows of parallels, sources of info and the like, so the end product goes out to a reasonably uniform and (hopefully) reasonably high standard. One advantage of a slightly more 'communal' approach like that is that lessons once learned tend to stay learned across the board, so hopefully the overall trajectory is upwards (eek, horrible phrase, sorry). Of course this relies on keep the same people for years....:face-thinks:

[Marcus Brody]

The process here is in general that you write the thing, bung it at the management with some pics, it reappears an indeterminate time later with edits scribbled incomprehensibly in the margins ...

That's another thing; I've seen examples of extremely poorly-written reports that are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors where it's apparently been passed by the author, edited by someone else, then signed off by a senior figure in the unit whose role is to provide 'quality assurance' or something similar. While I can accept that the original author may have made errors, I've never understood how such reports get past the unit's own internal monitoring procedure, even before being supplied to the curator - it suggests that the editor and 'quality assurance' person probably didn't really read it.