Elected Officials and Political Offices Editing and Proofreading Services

An elected member's office produces more writing per staff member than almost any other workplace, in more registers, under more scrutiny. The same small team drafts a condolence letter, a speech, a press release, a submission to a committee, and four hundred replies to constituents who wrote about the same issue. Most of it is written by people in their twenties with no editorial support, and every piece of it is attributed to the member personally and can be screenshotted.

We edit what constituency and legislative offices produce — constituent correspondence and casework letters, template replies for high-volume issues, newsletters and householder mailings, speeches and members' statements, press releases and media statements, opinion pieces and letters to editors, committee submissions and questions on notice, private members' bill explanatory material, briefing notes prepared by staff for the member, community and stakeholder correspondence, condolence and congratulation letters, social media copy and constituent survey questions, and constituency office procedures and casework standards. Our editors work to the member's own voice rather than imposing one, and we check that the office sounds consistent across everyone who writes on its behalf.

The high-volume template reply is where offices lose the most goodwill and where editing pays for itself immediately. Four hundred people write about a bill; each receives a letter that thanks them for taking the time, sets out the government's or party's position at length, and does not tell them what the member thinks or intends to do. Constituents recognise a form letter instantly and read it as being managed rather than heard. We rewrite these so the first line acknowledges the specific thing the person raised in their own terms, so the member's own position is stated clearly even where it differs from the correspondent's, so the concrete action — how the member will vote, what they have asked the minister, what they cannot do and why — appears rather than being implied, and so the tone accepts disagreement without defensiveness. A template written this way still saves the staff time and reads as a reply from a person, which is the entire point of the exercise.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including casework involving identifiable constituents, draft speeches and material before release. We are editors rather than political or legal advisers and offer no view on policy or strategy — the positions expressed remain entirely the member's. What we can do is make the office's writing clear, consistent and recognisably human across a very high volume.