Seniors Organizations Editing and Proofreading Services

Forty years separate the two readers of one leaflet. A sixty-two-year-old who retired last month and a ninety-eight-year-old in residential care are both filed under the word seniors, and material written for the category tends to land near the older end. The sixty-two-year-old puts the leaflet down on the first page. Large type is welcome; a tone that assumes comprehension has faded along with eyesight is not, and older readers identify that tone within a sentence.

The documents we edit for Seniors Organizations

Information guides on benefits, care, housing, and health are the longest documents this sector sends us. Service information and access material arrives more frequently, along with membership and activity program copy, newsletters, and member magazines. Fraud and scam awareness material comes in regularly, as does digital inclusion and technology guidance, befriending and social contact program material, and information written for family caregivers. The work also covers end-of-life and planning information including wills and powers of attorney, campaign and policy material on aging, volunteer recruitment aimed at older volunteers, funding applications and reports, and staff guidance on communication and capacity. Our editors work on register as carefully as on reading level.

What the editing involves

Scam awareness material is where the tone goes wrong most visibly, and the organizations we work for tell us the cost shows up in reports that never get made. A leaflet headed "Don't be a victim" addresses the reader as someone who has already failed. A leaflet opening "These calls are designed by professionals to work on careful people" asks the reader to concede nothing, and it carries them to the next paragraph.

Rules read better than assessments when the reader is being pressured on the phone. "Be cautious about unexpected calls" asks a person to judge a situation built to defeat judgment. "No bank will ever ask you to move money to a safe account, so anyone who does is a criminal" gives a rule that holds without a decision. The organization supplies that rule and stands behind it, and we do not write the substance of it. Our work is on the wording, on keeping the rule identical in the leaflet, the newsletter, and the poster, and on placing it above the descriptions of individual scams rather than after them.

The section on what to do after an incident belongs early in the leaflet. In the drafts we receive it usually sits on the last page, behind eleven paragraphs of prevention, which reaches people before anything happens and leaves the ones who called for help with nothing. That section reads best when it opens with the phone number, names the action the organization wants taken first, and says in the organization's own words that "this was not your fault."

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including information about identifiable people. We are editors, not legal, financial, care, or clinical advisors, and we offer no opinion on entitlements, capacity, care decisions, or any individual case. What we can do is take out the tone that stops an older reader at the first paragraph.