Military and Armed Forces Editing and Proofreading Services

Every performance evaluation in the file says the same thing: exceptional leader, unlimited potential, promote ahead of peers. Ninety-two percent of the evaluations written this cycle say some version of that sentence, because a rater who writes anything less is understood to be damaging the person being rated, not describing them accurately. A promotion board looking at a stack of files where everyone is exceptional has no actual information in front of it, and the one evaluation that tells the truth about an average performance reads, by comparison, like a career-ending report.

We edit what service members and their raters produce for performance evaluation — officer and enlisted evaluation narratives, award and commendation citations, after-action reviews and lessons-learned reports, fitness reports and comment blocks, letters of recommendation for schools and boards, and the counselling documentation that is supposed to precede and support an evaluation. Our editors work on writing inside a system where almost everyone is described in the same superlative terms.

The specific, comparative accomplishment is what makes an evaluation narrative mean anything inside a system flooded with superlatives, and its failure is a string of adjectives that could describe anyone the rater has ever met. Exceptional and unlimited potential say nothing a board can rank against another file that says the same thing. We work through these so accomplishments are stated with a number, a rank-order, or a comparison that a board can actually weigh, since "ranked #2 of 34 company commanders in the battalion" tells a board something "an exceptional company commander" does not; so the narrative describes what was actually done rather than what quality it displayed, given that "led a 40-person platoon through a contested river crossing under fire, reorganising two squads after a casualty, with zero further casualties" carries more than "demonstrated exceptional leadership under pressure"; so a weakness or development area is included honestly where one exists, because an evaluation with no room for growth is read by an experienced board as either an exceptional outlier or a rater unwilling to write anything real, and only one of those readings helps the person being rated; so the language used matches what was actually observed rather than the maximum language the format allows, as inflation this severe means the strongest true praise and the routine praise use identical words; so counselling that should have preceded the evaluation is documented as having happened, given that an evaluation with no supporting counselling record looks, to a board, like a rating invented at the deadline; and so citations and narratives avoid boilerplate phrases that appear identically across many service members' files, since a board that has read the same sentence forty times stops reading it at all. Evaluations written this way are the ones a board can actually use to tell people apart.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including performance records, personnel information and career details. We are editors rather than commanders, raters or personnel specialists, and we offer no view on performance, promotion or career decisions. What we can do is make the narrative say something a board can actually act on.