Appeal Letters Editing and Proofreading Services

Someone writes to appeal a decision that has gone against them and spends four pages explaining how unfair it feels, how long they have waited, and how badly the outcome has affected their family. All of it is true. The person reading it works from a list of grounds on which a decision can actually be changed, finds none of them named, and upholds the original decision — not because the appeal was weak, but because the letter never told the reviewer which of their own rules the decision had got wrong.

We edit what people write when appealing a decision — appeal letters to government departments and agencies, internal review requests, university grade and academic misconduct appeals, insurance and benefit denial appeals, employment and disciplinary appeals, licensing and permit refusal appeals, escalation letters to ombudsman services, and the supporting statements and chronologies that go with them. Our editors work on the letter a reviewer reads with a checklist in front of them.

The opening of an appeal letter is what determines whether the reviewer reads the rest of it as an argument or as a complaint, and its failure is a page of feeling where the reviewer is looking for a ground. We work through these so the specific ground of appeal is named in the first paragraph, in the words the organisation's own policy uses, since a reviewer working from a defined list needs to see where your case fits before anything else you say can matter; so the decision being appealed is identified precisely by date, reference number and decision-maker, given that a reviewer handling many files cannot act on a letter they cannot match to a record; so the facts are set out as a dated sequence separate from your argument about them, because a reviewer needs to establish what happened before weighing what it means, and the two mixed together force them to do both at once; so each piece of evidence is tied to the specific point it supports rather than attached as a bundle, since evidence a reviewer has to interpret unaided is evidence that may not be read the way you intended; and so the outcome you are asking for is stated exactly — reconsider, overturn, reduce, remit for a fresh decision — given that a letter which establishes an error without saying what should follow leaves the remedy to someone with no reason to choose the one you wanted. Letters written this way get read as appeals rather than as objections.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including personal circumstances, case details and correspondence. We are editors rather than lawyers, advocates or advisers, and we offer no view on the merits of your case, the grounds available to you or what you should argue. What we can do is make sure the letter says clearly what you meant it to say.