Diplomatic and Foreign Service Editing and Proofreading Services

Diplomatic writing is unusually consequential for its length. A reporting telegram of eight hundred words may be the only account a capital receives of a conversation that changes a position. A note verbale of three sentences can constitute a state's formal view. And the whole genre operates under a convention of understatement so established that meaning travels through calibration — where "we noted with concern" and "we view with grave concern" are not stylistic variants but different messages, understood as such by everyone who reads them.

We edit what foreign ministries and missions produce — reporting telegrams and despatches, country and political analyses, briefing notes and scene-setters for ministerial visits, talking points and lines to take, notes verbales and diplomatic correspondence, démarche instructions and reporting, speeches and statements for multilateral fora, negotiating instructions and position papers, treaty and agreement texts and explanatory memoranda, consular case documentation and advice to citizens, travel advisories, public diplomacy and cultural programme material, and post reporting on trade, development and security cooperation. Our editors are conscious of register and of the difference between what a document says and what it signals.

The reporting telegram is where the craft is most tested, because it must carry both information and judgement while keeping them visibly separate. A capital reading a post's assessment needs to know what was said, by whom, and what the post concludes from it — and cannot afford a document in which the interlocutor's words and the officer's interpretation have merged. We work on these so the account of the meeting is reported as an account, with attributions and, where it matters, the actual formulation used rather than a paraphrase; so the post's assessment is separately marked and states its confidence and its basis; and so the comment section does what it exists for — telling the capital what the post thinks this means and what it recommends — rather than restating the narrative. We also cut the hedging that accumulates in institutional drafting, because a telegram that commits to nothing will be read as saying nothing, and the post's influence rests on being worth reading.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence. We are editors rather than diplomats or legal advisers and offer no view on policy, negotiation or treaty interpretation. We work only on material you are authorised to share with an external editor, and we ask that classified or protectively marked documents not be sent to us. What we can do is make the writing precise, appropriately calibrated and clear about where reporting ends and assessment begins.