Dragon Boat and Paddling Clubs Editing and Proofreading Services

The crew list for the festival goes up on a Tuesday evening. Twenty-two names are on it and nine are not, and by Thursday three of the nine have stopped coming to training. Nobody was told why they were left out, what would have got them in, or whether the decision was about their paddling at all — and the club has just lost three members it spent a season recruiting.

We edit what dragon boat, canoe, kayak and rowing clubs produce — crew selection and seat allocation communications, training and attendance expectations, safety and capsize procedures, novice and taster information, festival and regatta entry documents, coach and sweep briefings, club constitutions and committee papers, and the messages that follow a decision people did not like. Our editors work on communications that go to a whole club at once.

The crew selection communication is the document that decides whether a paddling club holds together, and its failure is a list posted without a basis. A crew list is a judgement about people, published in public, and the club owes an account of it. We work through these so the criteria are published before selection rather than after, since criteria explained afterwards read as justification and criteria published in March are a training plan; so the weighting between attendance, timed performance, technique and boat balance is stated, because paddlers assume it is one of these and it is usually a combination they were never told about; so the boat-balance constraint is explained plainly, given that being left out because of weight distribution or a side preference has nothing to do with ability and a paddler who is not told assumes the worst; so the person who selects is named with who they consulted, as anonymous decisions attract the worst interpretations; so everybody who is not selected is told individually and before the list is public, with one specific thing to work on; so the route back in is stated with the next selection date, since a paddler with a date keeps training and one without stops; so any discretionary place is declared as discretionary; and so the club says what it will not do — no selection by seniority, no places held for committee members. Communications written this way keep the nine.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including selection material, member information and committee papers. We are editors rather than coaches, sweeps or selectors, and we offer no view on selection, technique or safety. What we can do is make the decision explicable to the people it disappoints.