Speakers and TEDx Applicants Editing and Proofreading Services

The application asks for the idea in one sentence. The applicant writes: "I want to talk about how technology is changing the way we connect with each other, drawing on my twenty years in the field." That is a topic, not an idea. A topic can be discussed for eighteen minutes. An idea is a thing the audience did not believe when they sat down and does believe when they stand up.

We edit speaker applications and the writing around them — one-sentence idea statements and talk proposals, speaker biographies and one-sheets, session descriptions for conference programmes, pitch emails to organisers, and the outlines that turn an accepted idea into a structure. Our editors work on the sentence a curator reads before anything else.

The idea reduced to one sentence is what a speaking application is assessed on, and its failure is a subject area standing in for a claim. Curators are not choosing topics; they are choosing arguments. We work through these so the sentence contains something that could be disagreed with, since a proposition invites a reaction and a topic invites nothing; so it names what the audience currently believes and what they should believe instead, because that gap is the talk and a proposal without it has no shape; so the sentence is short enough to be repeated by a curator to a colleague, given that this is literally how selection happens in a committee; so the speaker's authority for the claim appears separately rather than inside the idea, as credentials in the sentence weaken it; so the evidence that would persuade a sceptic is named in the paragraph beneath; so nothing is promised that eighteen minutes cannot deliver, since the commonest rejection is scope; so the idea is one the speaker could still defend if the audience were experts, because the strongest applications survive an audience that already knows the field; and so the sentence would be worth saying even if the speaker were not the one saying it. Applications written this way get through the first cut.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished ideas, applications and unsuccessful attempts. We are editors rather than curators, coaches or event organisers, and we offer no view on your idea, any event or any selection. What we can do is turn the topic into a claim.