Design Competition Entries Editing and Proofreading Services

A competition brief lists evaluation criteria as "design excellence, sustainability, and buildability," each worth an unspecified share of the final score. Forty firms spend six weeks producing entries, and the jury's actual deliberation turns out to weigh a submission's opening rendering more heavily than anything the brief named, because nothing in the criteria said how sustainability would actually be measured, what buildability was being assessed against, or what proportion of the score either one carried. The firms that lost cannot tell whether they misjudged the brief or the brief never actually meant what it said.

We edit what competition organisers produce to define how entries will be judged — evaluation criteria and their scoring weight disclosures, submission requirement and compliance checklists, jury brief and deliberation process documentation, and the correspondence responding to a competitor's question about how a specific criterion will actually be assessed. Our editors work on the criteria list that has to mean the same thing to the jury as it does to the firms preparing an entry against it.

The weighted, measurable criterion is what a competition brief actually needs to state, and its failure is a list of qualities with no indication of how each will be judged or how much it counts. Design excellence, sustainability, and buildability names three categories and specifies none of them, leaving both the entrants and, in practice, the jury to invent their own working definition mid-process. We work through these so each criterion states what it will actually be assessed against — a specific sustainability standard or target, a stated buildability review against a cost benchmark, a design excellence criterion tied to the brief's stated project goals — rather than a word left for each juror to interpret separately; so the relative weight of each criterion is disclosed as an actual proportion of the total score, given that firms allocating six weeks of design effort need to know whether sustainability is worth ten percent or forty percent of the outcome; so submission requirements are stated as a compliance checklist with specific, checkable items, because a vague requirement like "demonstrate community engagement" produces entries that satisfy it in incompatible ways and a jury with no stated standard cannot fairly compare them; so the jury's actual deliberation process is disclosed, given that entrants deserve to know whether jurors score independently against the stated criteria or discuss and reach a consensus, since these produce different outcomes from the same submissions; and so a competitor's specific question about how a criterion will be assessed receives a direct answer, not a repetition of the brief's general language. Briefs written this way mean an entry judged well is one that met stated criteria, not one that happened to match an unstated preference.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including brief drafts, scoring criteria and competitor correspondence. We are editors rather than competition organisers, jurors or architects, and we offer no view on evaluation criteria, scoring or entry quality. What we can do is make sure the brief says what it is actually judging.