Gift and Stationery Editing and Proofreading Services

The wedding invitations come back from the printer, five hundred of them, with the groom's grandmother's name spelled "Margeret" instead of "Margaret." Nobody caught it because the proof was checked for layout and font, twice, by two different people who were both looking at the design and neither of whom was actually reading each name against the guest list it came from. Five hundred invitations cannot be quietly fixed. The proofing stage was the only point in the entire process where this was still correctable, and it was spent checking whether the calligraphy looked nice.

We edit what stationers and gift retailers produce before an irreversible print run — wedding and event invitation proofs, personalised gift and engraving order confirmations, greeting card and stationery copy, RSVP card and detail wording, name and date verification for custom orders, and the customer-facing proof approval process itself. Our editors work on the text that cannot be corrected once it exists in five hundred physical copies.

The dedicated fact-check pass is what catches an error that a design-focused proofread will not, and its failure is a proofing process that checks the same things twice rather than checking different things once each. A proof read for layout and a proof read for accuracy are different tasks, and a single read-through that tries to do both usually does neither completely. We work through these so names are checked against their original source — the guest list, the order form — character by character, separately from any check of how the design looks, since a proofreader focused on font and spacing reads names as shapes rather than as words to verify; so dates are checked for both correctness and consistency across every place they appear, given that a wedding invitation stating one date on the front and a different one on the RSVP card is a common and entirely preventable error; so titles, honorifics and name order are confirmed with the customer rather than assumed, because "Dr. and Mrs." and "Mr. and Dr." are not interchangeable to the people being addressed; so the approval process requires an explicit, itemised sign-off — names confirmed, dates confirmed, spelling confirmed — rather than a single "looks good, please print," given that a broad approval invites a broad, shallow check; so a customer supplying a guest list themselves is shown their own list beside the proof for direct comparison, as errors inherited from the customer's own source document are still errors that a side-by-side check would catch; and so any customisation involving a name is flagged for a second, independent check by someone who did not do the first one, given that the person who made a typo is the person least likely to see it on review. Proofs checked this way catch the error before it becomes five hundred copies of it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including guest lists, personal details and order information. We are editors rather than stationers, printers or event planners, and we offer no view on design or wording choices beyond accuracy. What we can do is make sure what gets printed is what was actually meant.