Journals and Diaries Editing and Proofreading Services

Twenty years of notebooks are being typed up before they are given to a daughter who asked for them. Most entries are fine as they are. A handful name people who are still alive, still married to each other, in terms the writer would not use if they were in the room. The writer wants the record honest and does not want it to detonate in somebody else's kitchen, and those two wishes do not automatically agree with each other.

We edit journals and diaries prepared for a reader other than the person who wrote them — private journals being transcribed or typed up, diaries prepared to be shared with children or grandchildren, travel and life journals intended for eventual publication or printing, entries selected for a memory book or family archive, diaries kept during a specific period such as an illness or a posting abroad, and the introductory note a diarist writes to explain the collection to whoever receives it. Our editors work with a form of writing that was never written to be read.

The decision about what stays exactly as written and what gets a note is what determines whether a diary can be safely handed over, and its failure is either untouched honesty that harms a living person or a quiet rewrite that falsifies the record. A diary edited into tact stops being a diary. We work through these so entries naming a living person in terms that could cause real harm are flagged rather than silently altered, since the choice belongs to the diarist and not to an editor, and a flag preserves both the original and the decision; so a redaction, where the diarist chooses one, is marked as a redaction rather than smoothed over invisibly, because an unmarked gap misleads a future reader into thinking nothing was there; so context is added only where the entry is now unreadable without it, given that a diary over-annotated with explanation stops sounding like the person who wrote it; so the diarist's actual voice, including the parts that are unflattering to the diarist, is left alone, as a diary cleaned up to make the writer look wiser in hindsight is no longer trustworthy about anything; so a note is prepared for the recipient explaining what kind of editing was done and what was not, since a family reading an edited diary needs to know that; so entries are kept in their original order and dated as written rather than reorganised by theme, because the disorder is often part of what is true; and so nothing is added that the diarist did not write. Diaries handled this way remain trustworthy documents rather than becoming another kind of memoir.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including the diary's contents, the people named in it and your reasons for sharing it. We are editors rather than archivists, therapists or family mediators, and we offer no view on what should be shared, redacted or told to anyone named in it. What we can do is help you hand it over as what it actually is.