Additional Guidance Good Practice

As mentioned above, we occasionally run into terms that cannot be tagged and for which creating a dictionary task is not necessary. For instance, if a citation reads ‘Configure all cameras to operate at the same frequency’, we would be unlikely to create a term for ‘same frequency’. Rather, we would tag ‘frequency’ in the citation and add ‘{be the same}’ to the additional guidance and tag it in order to highlight the requirement that cameras must be configured the same, as this is a critical part of the mandate.

Another reason that we might add to the Additional Guidance is when AD authors use a generic umbrella term to describe a more complex concept in the interest of brevity - this is most often found in longer documents. For example, if a section specifically calls out ‘the incident response process’, but all subsequent citations read ‘the process’, you need to add ‘{the incident response process}’ to the additional guidance.

The most common reason for using the Additional Guidance is to add a stub. As noted in a previous section stubs contain necessary context, and sometimes the primary verb. For example, if a stub reads ‘The organization establishes:’ and a subsequent citation reads ‘an incident response process', the stub is necessary to tag the full mandate.

Mapper Tip: When adding a single word or a phrase to the Additional Guidance, use curly brackets {}. Place a space between bracketed terms (i.e. {be accurate} {be complete}). When adding a stub, do not use curly brackets. Curly brackets indicate that a text entry is not part of the original document.