Martial Arts Schools Editing and Proofreading Services

A thirty-eight-year-old signs up for a beginners' course, comes for five weeks, and stops after the session where somebody hit him in the face. Not hard, not maliciously, and not against any rule — but nobody had told him that in week six people start hitting each other, and he had been picturing something else entirely.

We edit what martial arts schools produce — contact and sparring policies, beginner and trial course information, grading syllabuses and requirements, class descriptions and level information, membership and fee terms, injury, insurance and medical disclosure documents, instructor and assistant documentation, and the communications that manage a school of adults and children together. Our editors work on the information that decides who stays past week six.

The contact and sparring policy is the document that determines whether adult beginners continue, and its failure is a school that describes its values instead of its Tuesdays. Nobody leaves because of the philosophy; they leave because of what happened in a session they were not expecting. We work through these so the level of contact is described session by session across the first three months, since a beginner needs to know when contact starts, how hard, to what targets and with what protection; so light contact is defined by what it feels like rather than by the word light, because every school means something different by it and the newcomer's imagination fills the gap badly; so the right to decline is stated plainly with how to exercise it without a conversation — a gesture, a phrase, or simply sitting out — given that an adult who cannot see a way out of a drill will leave the school instead; so the protective equipment is specified with what the school provides, what must be bought, when it is needed and roughly what it costs; so injuries are described honestly with the frequency of the common ones, since a school that says injuries are rare and then produces a broken toe has lost more than a toe; so the position on children's classes and contact is set out separately; so the sparring partner matching is explained — by size, experience and consent — as this is what beginners are really afraid of; and so the policy says what an instructor will stop. Policies written this way keep adults in the room.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including school policies, member information and incident records. We are editors rather than instructors, medical practitioners or safety advisers, and we offer no view on technique, contact, safety or injury. What we can do is tell a beginner what Tuesday is actually like.