Air Quality Editing and Proofreading Services

An air quality alert states that the Air Quality Index has reached 165 and residents should "limit prolonged outdoor exertion." A parent reading this has no way to know whether that means cancelling their child's soccer practice, whether it is fine for a healthy adult to go for a run, or whether someone with asthma should stay indoors entirely, because the number and the phrase are both accurate and neither one translates into an actual decision for the specific person reading it.

We edit what air quality agencies and monitoring organisations produce to communicate risk to the public — air quality index alerts and health advisories, sensitive group and general population guidance, source and cause explanations for a pollution event, forecast and duration communications, and the correspondence responding to a resident's question about a specific alert. Our editors work on the number that has to become a decision for someone standing outside deciding whether to go for a run.

The audience-specific guidance is what an air quality alert actually needs to provide, and its failure is a single index number and a general phrase applied uniformly to people whose actual risk varies enormously. Limit prolonged outdoor exertion means something different to a healthy adult, a child at soccer practice, and someone with asthma, and a single instruction covering all three tells none of them precisely what to do. We work through these so guidance is broken out by group — general population, children and older adults, people with asthma or heart conditions — with a specific recommended action for each, since a healthy adult and a person with a respiratory condition are not managing the same risk at the same index level and a shared instruction under-protects one group or over-restricts the other; so the actual pollutant and its source are named where known, given that "poor air quality" from wildfire smoke and from ground-level ozone call for different precautions, particularly around whether staying indoors with windows closed actually helps; so a duration and forecast trend are given, because a resident deciding whether to cancel today's outdoor plans needs to know whether this is expected to clear by afternoon or persist for days; so specific activities are addressed directly — school outdoor recess, youth sports practice, construction work — rather than a general phrase like "prolonged exertion" that leaves the reader to translate it into their own actual plans; so an index level that requires a genuinely different response, such as moving from moderate to unhealthy for sensitive groups, is flagged as a change rather than left for the reader to notice the number moved; and so a resident's specific question about a specific activity or health condition receives a direct answer rather than a repetition of the general advisory language. Alerts written this way turn a number into an actual decision.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including monitoring data, health guidance and resident correspondence. We are editors rather than air quality scientists, public health officials or medical professionals, and we offer no view on health risk, monitoring data or guidance thresholds. What we can do is make sure the alert tells someone what to actually do.