Writing an order of service when you have about three days

The four pages, one at a time

The usual format is one A4 sheet, printed on both sides and folded once down the middle. That gives four pages.

• Front cover. A line like In loving memory of, or Celebrating the life of. Their name as the family says it, which is not always their full legal name. The dates, written however feels right, and a photograph. One good photograph beats three ordinary ones.
• Inside left. The order of service, in order, one line per item, with the person doing it named beside it.
• Inside right. Either a short life story, or the words of the readings and hymns so people can join in, or both if they fit. This is the page that varies most between families.
• Back cover. A thank you from the family, details of the reception, donation details if there is a charity, and often a short poem or verse.

If there is more to say than fits, the answer is usually a second folded sheet nested inside the first rather than smaller type. Six point text in a church with poor light is not read by anyone.

Getting the order of service right

Do not write this from memory or from a template you found. Ask whoever is leading the service, usually the minister, priest, imam or celebrant, to send you the running order, and use theirs. They do this every week and they will have it in an email by the evening.

A typical line looks like Eulogy | David Riley or Reading: Psalm 23 | read by Sarah. The vertical bar is just a way of separating the item from the person, and you can use a dash or put the name on the next line in italics instead.

Traditions do not run the same way, and a programme that imposes the wrong shape on a service is worse than one with no order of service at all. A requiem mass, a Baptist funeral, a Janazah prayer and a humanist celebration of life have different structures and different points at which people stand, sit or respond. Print the one you were given.

The fold is where it goes wrong

This is the thing that catches almost everyone, usually at the copy shop, usually the day before.

On a sheet folded once, the four pages do not print in reading order. Side one of the paper holds the back cover on the left and the front cover on the right. Side two holds page two on the left and page three on the right. So if you lay the pages out one, two, three, four in a word processor and print it double sided, your back cover ends up on the inside of the programme and your front cover ends up at the back.

Two ways to avoid it. Lay the pages out in the arrangement above rather than in reading order, and check by printing a single test copy on scrap paper and folding it. Or use something that does the arrangement for you and shows you the pages in reading order to proofread. Either way, fold a real sheet before you print two hundred of them.

Printing it, at home or at a shop

At home: one sheet of A4, double sided, flipping on the short edge. If your printer has no double-sided mode, print side one, put the paper back in the tray the right way round, and print side two. Test with two sheets before committing.

At a copy shop or the funeral director: send them a PDF, not a Word file, because a Word file reflows on their machine and your layout moves. If they are trimming the edges, the file needs a few millimetres of bleed, which means the background colour or photo runs past the trim line so a slightly off cut does not leave a white sliver.

On paper, something around 100 to 120 gsm holds a fold and does not feel flimsy in the hand. Standard printer paper is around 80 and it shows. Matte is easier to read than gloss under lights.

How many to print

The rough rule families use is one for every two people expected, plus twenty spare. People take them home, and people who did not come ask for one afterwards.

Under-ordering is the common mistake and it is the one you cannot fix on the day. Printing forty more costs very little. Running out at the door costs something you cannot get back.

Keep the PDF afterwards. Somebody will ask for a copy in a month, and being able to send the file rather than photographing a creased one matters more than you would expect.

Proofreading, which matters more than the design

Give one person the job of checking every name in the document against how that person spells it. Not the person who typed it. Someone else, reading it out loud, slowly.

The names that get misspelled are the ones nobody thought to check: a grandchild's second name, a maiden name, a place name, the minister's title. A printed error in a name is the detail a family remembers for years, and it is entirely preventable in ten minutes.

Check the dates and times too. The service time on the programme and the service time in the funeral director's notice should match, and if they do not, one of them is going to be wrong in front of everybody.

Doing it without paying anyone

A word processor will do this. Set an A4 page to landscape, add two columns, type the back cover in the left column and the front cover in the right, and do the inside pages on page two. It is not elegant and it works, and it is free, and if you are comfortable in Word this is a reasonable evening's job.

The funeral director will usually print one for you as well. Most charge per copy, which is fine for fifty and adds up at two hundred and fifty, and you are handing over the layout decisions along with the money.

The part that is genuinely tedious by hand is not the words. It is the arrangement for folding, the bleed, and the reprint when someone spots a missing name after you have already run the copies.

Questions, answered.