Arts Councils Editing and Proofreading Services

Nine hundred applications, ninety awards, and eight hundred and ten artists who will each spend a week wondering what they did wrong. What the council writes about how decisions are made — before the round opens and after it closes — determines whether that becomes a constituency or a grievance, and most councils write it as though the only readers were the successful ones.

We edit what arts councils and funding bodies produce — programme guidelines and eligibility criteria, assessment criteria and scoring frameworks, applicant guidance and worked examples, feedback to unsuccessful applicants, assessor briefing and training material, board and committee papers, annual reports and impact reporting, and policy consultations. Our editors work on documents read by people with a great deal at stake.

The published assessment criteria and the feedback that follows are the same document seen from two ends, and their failure is criteria that describe qualities rather than evidence. An applicant cannot address a criterion they cannot recognise in their own work. We work through these so each criterion states what the assessor will be looking for and where in the application they will look for it, since "artistic quality" is a category and "evidence in the work samples that the applicant has made work of this ambition before" is a criterion; so the weighting is published, because an applicant allocating three weeks needs to know that one section carries forty per cent; so the standard is illustrated with a worked example of a strong and a weak response, given that guidance without examples is interpreted differently by every reader; so what is not assessed is stated, as applicants otherwise spend effort on presentation, letters of support and history that carry no weight; so feedback quotes the criterion and says what the panel could not find rather than what was wrong, since the first is actionable and the second is a verdict; so the score distribution is published so an applicant can tell a near miss from a long way off; and so the guidance is written for a first-time applicant without patronising a tenth-time one. Documents written this way build a sector that keeps applying.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including draft guidelines, assessment material, board papers and applicant information. We are editors rather than arts officers, assessors or policy advisers, and we offer no view on criteria, decisions or funding policy. What we can do is make the criteria something an applicant can act on.