Disc Golf and Emerging Sports Editing and Proofreading Services

A club asks a council for eight hectares of scrubby parkland nobody uses. The councillor reading the proposal has never seen the sport, is picturing frisbees hitting dog walkers, and has four other requests for the same money. What the proposal explains is the rules of the game — which is the one thing the decision does not turn on.

We edit what disc golf clubs and emerging sports organisations produce — proposals to landowners, councils and parks departments, course design and installation documentation, safety and land-use assessments, club constitutions and membership material, tournament and league documentation, funding and grant applications, and the explanatory material a sport needs when nobody has heard of it. Our editors work on documents that have to explain a sport to somebody who does not care about it yet.

The proposal to a landowner is the document an emerging sport lives or dies by, and its failure is an enthusiast writing to another enthusiast. A councillor is not deciding about the sport; they are deciding about liability, maintenance, complaints and whether this is a good use of land. We work through these so the land use is described in terms the decision-maker uses — the footprint, what is removed, what is added, what the ground looks like afterwards and whether the space remains available for anything else; so the safety question is answered before it is asked, with the fairway widths, the separation from paths, the sight lines and what the sport's own governing guidance says, because the mental image of an object flying at a child is the real obstacle; so the maintenance burden is quantified and, where the club will carry it, written as a commitment with names; so the cost is broken down with what the club funds and what it is asking for; so the benefit is stated in the terms the landowner is measured by — usage of an underused space, deterrence of antisocial behaviour, participation numbers, low running cost — rather than in the language of the sport; so comparable installations are cited with a contactable person at each; so the reversibility is stated, since a scheme that can be removed in a day is much easier to approve; and so the sport is explained in three sentences and no more. Proposals written this way get land.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including proposals, correspondence and club documents. We are editors rather than course designers, planners or safety advisers, and we offer no view on design, safety or land use. What we can do is write for the person who has never seen the sport.