Golf Courses Editing and Proofreading Services

A fourball goes out at 9:12 and comes back four hours and fifty minutes later. Behind them, eleven groups have spent the morning waiting on tees. The club's policy says players should maintain a good pace and keep up with the group in front — which is a sentiment, and which is why the starter, the marshal and the members have had the same argument every Saturday for nine years.

We edit what golf clubs and courses produce — pace of play policies and starter scripts, local rules and course information, member handbooks and committee communications, green fee and visitor information, competition conditions and entry documents, buggy and cart policies, course condition notices and maintenance communications, and the letters that follow a complaint about another member. Our editors work on documents that have to be applied to people who own the place.

The pace of play policy is where a club either manages its course or complains about it, and its failure is an exhortation with no measurement in it. Nobody can be too slow against a good pace. We work through these so the target is expressed as a time to a checkpoint rather than a total round time, since a group can only act on knowing they are eleven minutes behind at the ninth and cannot act on a four-hour-twelve target; so the position on the course is defined as the gap to the group in front rather than the group behind, because a group in position behind a slow group is being told off for somebody else's round; so the times are printed on the card and on posts at the fourth, ninth and fourteenth, given that a policy nobody can check while playing is a policy that lives in the clubhouse; so the marshal's intervention is scripted with what they say and at what point, as this is an unpleasant job done by volunteers and a form of words makes it survivable; so the consequence is stated and graded, from being asked to invite the group through to a competition penalty; so the club's own contribution is acknowledged — tee interval, pin positions, rough height and buggy paths all change pace, and a policy that blames only players is not credible; so ready golf is described as specific permitted behaviours rather than as an idea; and so the policy applies identically to members and visitors. Policies written this way take twenty minutes off a Saturday.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including policies, committee papers and member correspondence. We are editors rather than club managers, professionals or governing bodies, and we offer no view on rules, pace or club decisions. What we can do is give the policy something to measure.