Federal Government Departments Editing and Proofreading Services

A federal department runs on documents that travel upward through many hands and arrive in front of someone with four minutes. Each layer adds a qualification, softens a claim, and inserts the interests of the branch it came from, so that a proposal which began as a clear recommendation reaches the minister as a balanced description of considerations. Ministers then ask the question the note failed to answer, the file goes back down, and three weeks disappear. Most of what is wrong with government writing is this process rather than the people in it.

We edit what departments and central agencies produce — briefing notes and issue notes for ministers and deputy heads, memoranda to Cabinet and Treasury Board submissions, question period cards and parliamentary committee briefing books, regulatory impact analysis statements, departmental plans and results reports, programme terms and conditions, evaluation and internal audit reports, policy options papers, correspondence for ministerial signature, guidance and interpretive material for the public, service standards and client-facing content, memoranda of understanding between departments, and material for tabling in the legislature. Our editors work within your templates and approval conventions, which are usually not the problem, and on the drafting inside them, which usually is.

The briefing note's recommendation is where these documents live or die. A note that sets out background, considerations and options, and then recommends that the minister "note the analysis" or "consider the options presented", has transferred the decision back to the person with the least time to make it. We rewrite these so the recommendation appears at the top and states what the minister is being asked to approve, in a sentence that could be signed; so the options are genuinely distinct rather than one real option flanked by two that nobody would choose; so the risk of the recommended course is stated alongside the risk of doing nothing, since the second is routinely omitted; and so anything the minister will be asked about publicly is anticipated in one line. Departments that discipline their notes this way find that decisions come back faster and come back decided, which is the only measure that matters.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence. We are editors rather than policy or legal advisers and offer no view on any policy question. We work only on material you are authorised to share externally, and we ask that Cabinet confidences, classified documents and protectively marked material not be sent to us. What we can do is make the drafting sharp, brief and decision-ready.