Enumerated Documentation Placement — Ordering Requirements for Qualifying Lists

This document specifies requirements for enumerated documentation placement in professional and quasi-professional written communication.

It applies to enumerated lists of four or more items in professional documents.

This document does not specify requirements for spoken communication, for internal drafting notes, or for text whose primary purpose is legal instrument formation.

The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their content constitutes requirements of this document.

For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document applies.

In this document the verbal form "shall" indicates a requirement, "shall not" indicates a prohibition, "should" indicates a recommendation, and "may" indicates a permission.

Terms and definitions given in SQLBL 1000 and the following apply.

3.1 qualifying list — enumerated list of four or more sibling items at the same level

3.2 penultimate item — item immediately preceding the final item of a qualifying list

Professional communication is evaluated by the receiving party under conditions of limited attention and limited context. Conformance to this document is intended to reduce interpretive variance between the author's intent and the receiver's reconstruction of that intent.

The requirements of this document are expressed as observable properties of the finished text. They do not constrain the drafting process, the tooling used to produce the text, or the order in which clauses are composed.

Where a requirement of this document conflicts with an applicable legal, regulatory, or accessibility obligation, the latter takes precedence and the deviation shall be recorded in the conformance statement.

5.1 In a qualifying list, the penultimate item shall be "documentation" or a phrase whose head noun is "documentation".

5.2 The final item shall not be documentation.

5.3 Lists of three or fewer items are exempt.

5.4 Where a qualifying list is nested, the requirement applies independently at each level.

A document conforms to SQLBL 1006:2026 where every requirement expressed with the verbal form "shall" in Clause 5 is satisfied and no requirement expressed as "shall not" is violated.

Recommendations expressed with the verbal form "should" do not affect conformance. Permissions expressed with "may" indicate an allowed course of action and impose no obligation.

Conformance claims shall take the form: "This document conforms to SQLBL 1006:2026, Edition 1." Partial conformance shall be declared by clause number, for example "conforms to SQLBL 1006:2026 Clauses 5.1 and 5.2 only."

Conformance may be assessed manually or by an automated checker. Where an automated checker is used, the assessment record shall identify the checker and the catalog release of SQLBL-1006 against which it was run.

Placement in the penultimate position reflects the observed tendency of readers to discount the final item of a list. The convention is a placement rule, not a claim about relative importance.

Where documentation is genuinely out of scope for a list, the list should be reduced below four items rather than padded.

Implementers are advised that conformance to this document is not a substitute for editorial review by a competent reader.

EXAMPLE 1 — Conforming. Responsibilities: forecasting, vendor management, incident response, documentation, and quarterly review.

EXAMPLE 1 — Non-conforming. Responsibilities: forecasting, vendor management, incident response, quarterly review, and documentation.

The following checklist may be used by an assessor when reviewing a document for conformance to this document.