A manual audit on one of our own product lines turned up something worth describing plainly, because it’s a common failure mode, not a rare one: three real hazards were sitting in the text at the same visual weight as a note about not stacking cartons too high.
What “no hierarchy” actually looks like in practice
The original GTYPS manual, an 11-page document for a high-speed permanent-magnet motor line, listed its instructions in numbered clauses with no visual distinction between severity levels. Three of those clauses covered genuine hazards:
- Section 4.1: never connect the motor directly to a three-phase supply without a variable-frequency drive.
- Section 8.3: the motor continues to generate voltage briefly after being disconnected from the supply, because the rotor keeps spinning and the magnets keep inducing current until it stops.
- Section 7.1: grounding requirements before the motor is energized.
None of the three read as more urgent than the surrounding packaging and storage notes, because nothing in the formatting told the reader otherwise. A technician skimming the document under time pressure, which is most technicians most of the time, has no visual cue to slow down at clause 8.3 and treat it differently from a note about pallet height.
That third example is worth sitting with, because it’s specific to permanent-magnet motors and easy to miss if you’re used to induction machines. An induction motor goes electrically dead the moment it’s disconnected. A permanent-magnet motor doesn’t, because the magnets are still there and the rotor is often still turning: it keeps generating voltage at its terminals for a period after disconnection. A technician trained on induction equipment, opening a junction box on the assumption that “unplugged” means “safe,” is exactly the reader this kind of hazard needs to catch before the second sentence, not somewhere in the fifth paragraph of section 8.
What ANSI Z535.6 actually requires
ANSI Z535.6 defines four signal-word levels for use in product manuals, each tied to a specific severity and certainty of harm:
| Signal word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| DANGER | Will cause death or serious injury if not avoided |
| WARNING | Could cause death or serious injury if not avoided |
| CAUTION | Could cause minor or moderate injury |
| NOTICE | Risk of property or equipment damage, no injury risk |
The standard also expects a short “About This Manual” section defining the signal words before they’re used, so a reader doesn’t have to infer what CAUTION means the first time it appears, and a document control block recording revision history, so a technician on-site knows whether they’re holding the current version.
What changed, and what’s still pending confirmation
The rebuilt GTYPS manual grew from 11 pages to 14: a signal-word legend and qualified-personnel note up front, a six-panel safety summary that cross-references the numbered clauses it’s drawn from, and a document control block on the cover. None of the underlying technical content changed. The hazards were already correctly described; they just weren’t visually triaged.
Two things about that revision are still open, and worth saying plainly rather than glossing over. First, assigning the exact severity level to each hazard, for instance whether the residual-voltage note in 8.3 should read as WARNING or DANGER, is a judgment call that belongs to a compliance engineer with the full risk assessment in front of them, not a documentation pass alone. Second, the revision code on the cover assumes this is the first formal release, inferred from the document numbering rather than confirmed against a release log. Both are flagged for internal sign-off before the document ships as a final compliance artifact. A manual that gets the structure right but leaves its severity calls unverified is closer to correct than one with no structure at all, but “closer” isn’t “done.”
The GTYPS product line this manual covers is on the permanent-magnet motors page; technical documentation requests go through the support center.