Tools

Ammonia Refrigeration Process Safety Management (PSM) compliance tools are listed here https://factplusfancy.com/R717

We are continuously developing the following resources to facilitate rule writing. We are evaluating making these available online.

Catalog of Rule Problems, Causes, and Consequences

This catalog actually starts with examples of useful rule-writing methods, whose positive influences outweigh the catalog of problems that follows. It is meant as a rule-writing aid, and also as a way to publicize some causes of poorly written rules, with quotations from and citations to examples. Its scope covers environmental, health, safety, building, and land-use codes, regulations, and standards as well as underlying science and engineering models. All of the above seek their goals via nested sets of rules, the former to achieve some measurable public benefit and the later to simulate or predict repeatable measurements. We look at the interlinking of all of these types of nested rules in this catalog.

Annotated Bibliography of Rule-Writing Methods and History

This broader database includes quotes, comments, and citations to materials about standards and regulation writing from diverse sources. It includes materials on the influence of rule writing in the history of technology and science.

Administrative Docket Automation via Web-accessible Databases

This includes software and training for organizing docket materials into a database during rule drafting and then making the rule available online with links to this docket database. Please see our rule-writing services for details.

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In the meantime, here is the most authoritative modern American story about rules and language we have found so far:

In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind--and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing. In Hannibal [Missouri] we seldom saw a slave misused; on [my uncle's] farm, never.

There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half-way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing--it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this--

"Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child's noise would make you glad."

It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work.

--Mark Twain, "Chapters from My Autobiography.--XIII." North American Review, March 1, 1907, pp. 454-455.