Royal Commissions and Public Inquiries Editing and Proofreading Services

Fourteen months after the final report was published, a reporter asked the department what had become of recommendation 31. Nobody could say. The report ran to 1,900 pages in four volumes, and the recommendations sat in an appendix, numbered but not sequenced, each addressed to "relevant agencies" rather than to a named office. Its findings of fact had survived a legal challenge intact. What did not survive was any way for the public to check, a year later, whether anything had happened.

The documents we edit for Royal Commissions and Public Inquiries

Terms of reference and the procedural rulings that interpret them reach us early, often before the first hearing. Interim and final reports follow, along with findings of fact, analysis chapters, recommendations, and the implementation frameworks attached to them. Executive summaries, plain-language versions, and the opening and closing statements of counsel come to us as well. So do procedural fairness notices to individuals and institutions likely to be criticized, participant submissions, evidence summaries and chronologies, witness-facing information, and implementation monitoring documentation. Our editors handle material about serious harm and know what such material requires.

What the editing involves

The form of the inquiry changes with the jurisdiction, but the report does not. Royal commissions in Canada and Australia, statutory public inquiries in the United Kingdom, congressional investigations, independent commissions appointed by a governor, and inspector general reviews inside a federal agency all end in the same object. That object must establish what happened to a standard capable of surviving legal challenge, remain readable by the public whose confidence prompted it, and carry recommendations that outlast the news cycle. Most inquiries manage the first of those and fail at the rest.

The hardest editorial judgment in an inquiry concerns testimony from people who were harmed. Those accounts are usually the reason the inquiry exists, and the pull runs in two wrong directions at once. One is compression into neutral institutional prose, where "the resident was subject to a restraint incident" replaces what she said had been done to her. The other is a level of detail that serves a reader's appetite rather than the finding. Accounts belong in the witness's own words where those words carry the finding, and in paraphrase where they do not.

Language describing an institution should be as concrete as language describing a person, and it usually is not. "Mistakes were made in the referral process" names nobody and dates nothing, while "the county took eleven weeks to act on the third referral" is the same finding with an actor, a number, and a date. The passive voice arrives reliably at the moment an organization's own conduct comes up for description. Recommendations carry the same burden: one addressed to "relevant agencies" cannot be tracked fourteen months later, and one addressed to the state board of health, with a deadline and a named reporting route, can be. Where a report declines to make a finding, saying so plainly is better than a formulation that lets both parties claim it.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including evidence, draft findings, and material under publication restriction or procedural fairness process. We are editors, not lawyers or investigators, and we offer no opinion on any finding, criticism, or recommendation. What we can do is make the report readable, its reasoning visible, and its handling of testimony careful.