Artist Grant Applications Editing and Proofreading Services

An assessor has forty applications and a Tuesday evening. They will read the project description, and then they will open the work samples — and on most panels, that is where the decision actually happens. An applicant who has spent three weeks on the prose and twenty minutes choosing which four minutes of video to submit has allocated their effort exactly backwards.

We edit what artists preparing grant applications produce — work sample lists and their accompanying notes, project descriptions and workplans, budgets and their justifications, timeline and feasibility sections, biographies and support material, references to previous funded work, final and interim reports, and the resubmission letters that follow an unsuccessful round. Our editors work on applications assessed by people reading at speed.

The work sample and its note is where an artist's application is decided, and its failure is a strong body of work presented without direction. An assessor who has to guess what they are looking at will decide what they are looking at. We work through these so each sample is introduced with what it is, when it was made and why it is here, since a list of titles and dates asks the assessor to construct the argument themselves; so the note connects the sample to the proposed project explicitly, because the panel's question is not whether the work is good but whether this artist can make the thing they are describing; so time-based samples specify the excerpt with its timecode and say what happens in it, given that a panel watching from the start of a forty-minute piece sees the first ninety seconds and nothing else; so the most persuasive sample goes first rather than the newest or the most personally significant, as the order is a decision and most applicants do not make it; so anything about the sample that could be misread is pre-empted in half a sentence — a collaboration, a commission with constraints, an unfinished state; so technical requirements are met exactly, since samples that will not open are not assessed; and so the note is written for somebody with no context and no time. Applications built this way get past the stage where most are lost.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including applications, work samples, budgets and unsuccessful submissions. We are editors rather than assessors, arts officers or funders, and we offer no view on artistic merit, eligibility or any funding decision. What we can do is point the panel at what matters in your work.