Award Nominations Editing and Proofreading Services

A nomination runs to twelve hundred words about somebody the nominator has worked with for nine years. Every sentence is true and warm and the panel scores it below a nomination for somebody less deserving — because the whole document is one person's opinion, and the other one contained three letters from people who had never met each other and a figure nobody could argue with.

We edit nominations and the material that supports them — award and honour nominations, citations and short-form summaries, supporting letters and the briefs given to those writing them, evidence appendices, fellowship and honorary membership submissions, long service and recognition proposals, and the resubmissions that follow an unsuccessful year. Our editors work on documents assessed against criteria by people who do not know the nominee.

The nomination's evidence is what separates a winner from a well-liked candidate, and its failure is admiration in the nominator's own voice. A panel cannot score how much you think of somebody. We work through these so each criterion is answered in its own section with the criterion's own words as the heading, since a panel scores against a form and a flowing tribute forces them to hunt; so the strongest evidence comes from people other than the nominator, with two or three short letters from different directions rather than one long one from a colleague; so at least one claim carries a number that can be checked — people trained, funds raised, years served, a measured change — because a single verifiable figure anchors everything softer around it; so a specific incident is told at length rather than a list of qualities, given that panels remember one story and no lists; so the nominee's contribution is separated from their team's, as a panel that suspects credit is being borrowed discounts the whole submission; so anything the panel could find that works against the nomination is addressed rather than left to be discovered; so the citation is drafted at the required length, since the words a chair reads out are usually written by the nominator; and so the submission stays inside the word limit, because exceeding it is the commonest reason a nomination is not considered at all. Nominations written this way win.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including nominations, supporting letters and material about people who have not been told they are nominated. We are editors rather than panel members or awarding bodies, and we offer no view on merit, criteria or any decision. What we can do is turn your admiration into evidence.