In April¿s column, I discussed in general the formats that create a road map for finding your way through a construction contract. MasterFormat organizes the written documents into 16 Divisions, and the requirements for the materials and products and their installation are described in Sections. I briefly discussed where the formats for these documents come from: the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) publishes them as parts of the Manual of Practice (MOP). I mentioned the Section¿s three Parts, General, Products, and Execution, and described the list of article titles as a checklist to help the specification writer remember what should be covered and to arrange the information in a consistent way. Let¿s look at this format in more detail.
The three Parts of a Section (General, Products, and Execution) are always included, and if one of them includes no requirements, the title is written and the text says ¿Not used.¿ The first level of division inside a Part is the article. If you use a typical alphanumeric outline organization, each article is numbered, the number starting with the number of the Part: 2.1, 2.2, or 2.01, 2.02. SectionFormat provides you with a list of article titles ¿ the checklist for what may be required in a specification Section and the guide for looking through a Section for the information you want.