Editorial Policy

Why this page exists

This page describes how Gleason Grade is made. It is here so that you can decide how much weight to give anything else on the site.

Dates

Published means published. We do not bump dates to look active, and an edit only changes the modified date when it changes what the article actually tells you to do.

Paid and unpaid links

Some links on this site are commercial. They never buy a rewrite of the surrounding paragraph.

Requests to soften a verdict are declined, and we keep them on file. More than one has become the subject of its own paragraph later.

How we choose what to write

We keep a running list of questions readers send us, plus questions we had ourselves and could not find a straight answer to. A topic gets written when it appears on that list more than once.

From notes to published page

• Dump first. Everything the writer believes goes down, unsorted.
• Mark the soft parts. Anything held on memory rather than evidence gets flagged.
• Check or cut. A flagged claim is either supported or removed. There is no third option.
• Second reader. Somebody else hunts for sentences that sound more certain than the evidence allows.

Named writers

Every article carries the name of the person who wrote it and links to their profile. We do not publish under a house byline, because a house cannot be asked to explain itself.

Roy Duffield, Founding grading contractor. Roy has run an excavator and a dozer for over twenty years, starting with basement digs on his father's crew before taking over the business himself. He writes about grading the way he explains a job to a homeowner standing in the mud next to him.

Marisela Ortiz, Civil engineer and drainage writer. Marisela spent eleven years stamping site plans for a municipal engineering firm before she got tired of watching good drainage designs get value-engineered out of the final build. She writes about the gap between a stamped plan and what actually gets graded.

Colton Reyes, Driveway and equipment writer. Colton learned road base by fixing the private drives a rural county would never touch, one load of gravel at a time. He writes about driveways, access roads, and the machines that build them from the operator's seat, not a spec sheet.

What we will not publish

• Anything promising a result we cannot demonstrate.
• Pages written backwards from a search term.
• Advice we would not repeat to somebody sitting across a table.

How mistakes are handled

Corrections go to info@gleasongrade.com. Include the address and the sentence. Anything factual is fixed without argument. Anything that changes what the article recommends gets a dated note underneath, so the change is visible.