Family Newsletters Editing and Proofreading Services

The Christmas letter goes to sixty people and reads like a company report: promotions, honour roll grades, a kitchen renovation, a marathon time, a holiday to somewhere warm. Everything in it is an achievement and nothing in it is a person. The cousin whose year included a divorce, the aunt who lost her job, and the grandparent who is simply glad everyone is still speaking to each other all receive the identical bright paragraph, and none of them recognise the family in it.

We edit what families write to send to each other once or twice a year — holiday and end-of-year family letters, family newsletters compiled from several households, updates sent to extended family who are not seen often, letters accompanying a family photo card, round-robin letters where each branch of the family adds a section, and the letter that has to acknowledge a hard year without becoming only about it. Our editors work on the one piece of writing some relatives read only once and keep for a decade.

The register — what gets full sentences and what gets a line — is what makes a family letter feel true rather than curated, and its failure is a document where every event receives the same triumphant tone regardless of what it actually was. A promotion and a difficult diagnosis should not sound the same. We work through these so achievements are stated once, plainly, without a chain of adjectives, since three exclamation marks around a school report reads as compensating for something; so a hard year is acknowledged in proportion rather than either buried in cheerfulness or made the whole letter, given that both extremes leave the reader unsure how the family actually is; so each person is shown doing something specific rather than summarised by a milestone, because "Ben started secondary school" is a fact and the actual sentence about him is the one where he explains why he renamed the dog; so comparisons between children or between households are avoided entirely, as a round-robin letter is read by everyone it is about; so recipients with very different lives are kept in mind, given that a letter heavy with property values and foreign holidays lands differently on a relative managing on very little; so the letter closes by inviting a reply rather than presenting a finished year; and so it stays short enough to be read standing up by the postbox. Letters written this way get kept in a drawer and reread.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including family news, personal circumstances and anything you would rather handle sensitively. We are editors rather than family counsellors, and we offer no view on what should or should not be shared. What we can do is help the letter sound like your family rather than like an announcement.