Obituaries Editing and Proofreading Services

The obituary runs to one paragraph: born, worked, married, survived by. It is accurate, it will run in the paper as requested, and a stranger reading it over breakfast will finish it knowing nothing about the person except the shape of a life that could belong to thousands of people born in the same decade. A death notice states that somebody has died. An obituary is supposed to explain why that matters.

We edit what families and writers produce for a published record of someone's life — newspaper and online obituaries, longer tribute obituaries for a local paper or professional publication, death notices with a short personal line added, obituaries written by a family member under time pressure, obituaries for someone whose life does not fit a conventional structure, and the version adapted for a workplace, club or organisation's own publication. Our editors work on the version of a life that outlives everyone who remembers it firsthand.

The organising detail is what turns a list of dates into an account of a person, and its failure is a structure that marches through education, career, marriage and survivors with nothing that could only be true of this particular life. Survived by his wife and two children is a fact pattern, not a person. We work through these so one detail, incident or characteristic anchors the whole piece and everything else is arranged around it, since a reader remembers the specific thing — that he built the boat in the garage over eleven winters — long after the job titles are forgotten; so the career is described by what the person actually did in it rather than by job titles alone, given that "spent forty years as a teacher" says less than the one line about the student who came back twenty years later to say thank you; so complicated relationships — a divorce, an estrangement, a blended family — are handled factually and without editorialising, as an obituary that pretends a family was simpler than it was is recognised as false by everyone who was actually in it; so cause of death is included or omitted deliberately, according to the family's wishes, rather than defaulted to euphemism; so the tone matches the person, since a formal register for someone famously informal misrepresents them in their own final public account; so donations, services and practical details are placed where they can be found quickly rather than buried in the middle of the narrative; and so someone reads it aloud before it is submitted, because obituaries are unusually likely to be read aloud by someone else, at some point, to someone who did not know the person at all. Obituaries written this way are kept, cut out, and handed down.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including family circumstances, health details and anything you are deciding how to describe. We are editors rather than funeral directors, celebrants or family counsellors, and we offer no view on your family or what should be included. What we can do is help the piece read as an account of one particular life.