Obituary Desks Editing and Proofreading Services

An obituary is journalism written about a person whose family is reading it days after they died, and it has to be true. Those two facts pull hard against each other. The desk is expected to produce an accurate account of a life, including the parts the family would prefer omitted, while handling people in the worst week of their lives — and to do it fast, because an obituary that appears three weeks late has missed its purpose. Very little writing carries this combination of speed, permanence and human proximity.

We edit what obituary desks, newspapers and memorial publishers produce — commissioned obituaries and staff-written notices, advance obituaries prepared for stock, family-submitted death notices and paid announcements, funeral notice formats and submission guidance, tribute and appreciation pieces, correction and amendment procedures, style guides covering names, titles, causes of death and survivor listings, contributor guidelines for freelance obituarists, verification procedures and source requirements, sensitivity guidance for deaths by suicide, overdose and violence, submission forms and pricing for paid notices, and archive and reprint policy. Our editors know that verification and tact here are the same job rather than competing ones.

Verification is where obituary desks are most exposed, because the usual journalistic instinct — ask the family — is unreliable at exactly the moment it is most needed. Families misremember dates, inflate ranks, omit earlier marriages, and occasionally submit a fabricated life. Meanwhile a hoax notice is trivially easy to send. We build verification into the writing process so every date, qualification, appointment and honour has a checkable source recorded against it, and so the desk knows which facts must come from a document rather than a relative; so the cause of death is included only where it is confirmed and where house policy says it belongs, with the wording settled in advance rather than negotiated during the call; so survivors are listed against a stated convention, since the omission of a partner or an estranged child is the complaint that arrives every time; and so the death itself is confirmed independently before anything is published. The desks that handle families best are the ones that are not improvising these decisions while someone is crying.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including advance obituaries held in stock and material about identifiable people. We are editors rather than journalists or legal advisers and offer no view on verification of any particular fact, or on defamation and privacy risk. What we can do is make the writing accurate, humane and consistent with the conventions you have chosen.