Newcomer and Settlement Documents Editing and Proofreading Services

A file goes in with every document the office asked for. Across the bundle the applicant's name appears three ways: the spelling on the passport, a different transliteration on a degree certificate issued in another script, and the family-name-first order used by a former employer. To the applicant these are plainly one name, and they have used all three for years without difficulty. To a caseworker comparing one document against another for consistency, they are three names. The file comes back with a request for clarification, and five months are added to a process that had nothing wrong with it.

We edit the documents people prepare while settling in a new country — personal statements and letters of explanation, sponsorship and support letters, employment and address histories, credential and qualification recognition submissions, housing and tenancy applications, school and childcare registration, applications for benefits and services, correspondence with banks and utilities, and the covering letters that hold a bundle together.

The consistency of a settlement file is what determines whether an officer processes it or returns it, and its failure is a difference that is obvious to you and carries none of its explanation to anyone else. We work through these so names, dates and places are rendered identically throughout the bundle, with any variant a document cannot change stated plainly once, since a caseworker checking one page against another treats an unexplained difference as a discrepancy to resolve rather than a spelling to pass over; so gaps in a history are accounted for briefly at the point where they fall, given that a reader whose task is to check continuity stops at an unexplained interval, and the reason that seemed too ordinary to mention is not available to them; so each question is answered at the width it was asked, since a narrow question answered with the whole story leaves the reader to extract an answer, and what they extract may not be what you would have chosen; so the English stays plain and the sentences short, because these files are worked through quickly and in quantity, and a fact carried in the middle of a long sentence is a fact that can be passed over; and so every document referred to in the text is named there exactly as it is labelled in the bundle, given that a reader who cannot match a reference to an item records the item as missing. Files edited this way are processed on what they contain.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including identity documents, immigration and personal details, and family circumstances. We are editors rather than immigration lawyers, licensed consultants or settlement advisers, and we offer no view on your eligibility, your status, which route applies to you or what you ought to say — advice of that kind has to come from someone qualified and regulated to give it in the country concerned. We add no facts and change nothing your documents record. What we can do is make sure the account you have given reads the same way across the whole file.