Anniversary Tributes Editing and Proofreading Services

Forty years is being marked in a function room, and the tribute describes a couple nobody in it recognises. They were devoted, they were always laughing, they built a wonderful family. All true, and all of it could be said about any of the eleven couples in the room. The two people it is about are sitting at the front listening to a description of a marriage rather than to their own.

We edit what people write for anniversary occasions — tributes and speeches for silver, ruby, golden and diamond anniversaries, toasts given by children and grandchildren, letters and cards written to a couple, memory books and collected contributions, printed programmes and the words read out between courses, video message scripts from relatives who cannot travel, and the tribute given when one of the couple is no longer living. Our editors work with people who have one chance to get it right in front of everybody.

The one story you tell is what makes an anniversary tribute land, and its failure is a highlight reel that flattens forty years into an adjective. A marriage is not described by its qualities; it is shown by one afternoon. We work through these so the story chosen is small and dated rather than large and typical, since the winter the boiler failed does more work than a decade of devotion; so the difficult years are present in some form, given that everybody in the room knows about the illness or the redundancy or the year they nearly did not make it, and a tribute that skips it flatters nobody; so the couple are described doing something rather than being something, because "she waited in the car park for two hours and said nothing about it" is a person and "she was patient" is a word; so both of them appear in the story as themselves, as tributes routinely make one the subject and the other the audience; so anything that would embarrass either of them in front of their grandchildren is cut without discussion; so the ending returns to the room and to the people in front of you rather than reaching for something eternal; and so it is short enough to be delivered by somebody whose voice will go. Tributes written this way are the ones people ask for a copy of.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including family details, drafts and anything else you would rather not discuss. We are editors rather than celebrants, speakers or family counsellors, and we offer no view on your family or on what should be said. What we can do is help you find the afternoon that carries the forty years.