"Instructed to": the two words that separate what happened from what's supposed to happen

Chicago's inspectors write in a house style you pick up after reading a few hundred reports. Findings first, in the past tense. Then instructions, in the imperative. Then the citation. Almost every violation follows that shape, and the seam between the parts is usually the phrase "instructed to."

An example

Here's a real one, lightly trimmed:

"Observed approximately 30 rat droppings in rear storage room. Instructed person in charge to remove all rat droppings, sanitize area and inform pest control of need for service. Priority foundation violation 7-38-020(A). Citation issued."

Three parts. The first sentence is what the inspector saw. The second is what the restaurant was told to do. The third is the legal reference.

When you're deciding whether to eat somewhere, only the first sentence matters. The instruction tells you what the fix is supposed to be, and the citation tells you the city made it official, but neither one is a fact about the kitchen.

Where people get tripped up

The instruction sentences reuse the scary words. "Instructed to eliminate pest activity." "Must rodent-proof the rear door." "Contact licensed pest control." If you skim, you'll count the word rodent three times in a paragraph that reports one gap under a door and no rodents.

We got tripped up by this ourselves. Our filters used to count those instruction sentences as evidence. They don't anymore, and the details of how we fixed it are in an earlier post.

A quick way to read any violation

Find the first "instructed" or "must" in the paragraph. Everything before it is the finding. Read that part carefully. Everything after it is the to-do list, and you can skim.

If there's no finding before the instruction, which happens on License inspections and on re-inspections that reference an earlier report, the violation is usually about something structural or administrative rather than something the inspector saw that day.

One more phrase worth knowing

"Not corrected." On a re-inspection, the notes often start with "previous violation from report dated such-and-such not corrected," followed by a restatement of the original finding. That means whatever was wrong the first time was still wrong. It's the most important phrase on a re-inspection report, and it's easy to miss because it's buried in a reference number.