Seniors Organizations Editing and Proofreading Services

Organisations working with older people write for an audience that is routinely patronised and notices immediately. Large type is welcome; being addressed as though comprehension had declined with eyesight is not. The audience also spans forty years — a newly retired sixty-two-year-old and a ninety-eight-year-old with dementia are not one group, and material addressed to "seniors" as a category tends to be pitched at the older end and read by neither.

We edit what older people's charities, seniors' organisations and age-focused services produce — service information and access material, membership and activity programme copy, information guides on benefits, care, housing and health, digital inclusion and technology guidance, fraud and scam awareness material, befriending and social contact programme material, carers' information and support content, end-of-life and planning information including wills and powers of attorney, campaign and policy material on ageing, volunteer recruitment aimed at older volunteers, newsletters and member magazines, funding applications and reports, and staff and volunteer guidance on communication and capacity. Our editors work on register as carefully as on reading level.

Scam and fraud material is where this sector most often gets the tone wrong, and getting it wrong has a specific cost. Written as a warning to a vulnerable group, it produces shame in exactly the people who most need to report an incident, and shame is the mechanism that keeps fraud unreported and repeated. We write these so the framing is that these approaches are designed by professionals to defeat careful people, which is true and is the sentence that makes a reader keep reading; so the specific current methods are described concretely enough to be recognised, since generic advice to be cautious protects nobody; so the instruction is a rule that removes the judgement call — no legitimate bank will ever ask you to move money to a safe account, so anyone who does is a criminal, end of the conversation — because a rule works under pressure and an assessment does not; and so the section on what to do if it has already happened comes early and says plainly that it is not the person's fault and who to ring. Material that leads with prevention and buries reporting reaches people before the event and abandons them after it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including information about identifiable people. We are editors rather than legal, financial, care or clinical advisers, and we offer no view on entitlements, capacity, care decisions or any individual situation. What we can do is make the writing clear, properly pitched and free of the tone that makes older readers stop reading.