Most obituaries read like they came off the same assembly line. Born on this date. Passed away on that one. Survived by a list of names. Preceded in death by another list. Services will be held. You finish reading and you still have no idea who the person was.
It doesn’t have to be that way, and writing a better one isn’t hard. You’re not trying to be a writer. You’re trying to get one real person onto the page. Here’s how.
Before you write a word, know what a notice costs
No other guide to this will tell you, so here it is first.
A newspaper obituary is advertising, billed by the line or the column inch, and the price surprises almost everyone. From the papers’ own current rate cards:
- The Washington Post charges $725 for four column inches in print, and $225 for each inch after that. Online only is $475.
- The Minneapolis Star Tribune charges $13.86 a line for the first day and $6.93 a line after.
- The Anchorage Daily News charges $250 for eighty lines, roughly three hundred words, then $12 a line beyond that.
- The Ellsworth American, a Maine weekly, charges $2.75 a line, with $25 for a photo.
The industry’s own numbers put the average paid notice at about $473.
Two things follow from that, and they change how you write.
A photo is not free, whatever the ad says. At the Star Tribune a large photograph displaces about eighteen lines of type, so it costs roughly $250. Their rate sheet says so plainly if you read far enough.
Every adjective is money. This is the real reason obituaries are short, and every guide that tells you to “be concise” without saying why has left out the part you needed. “He was a kind, generous, and deeply loving father” costs more than “He was a kind father” and says less.
None of that means don’t run one. It means decide the budget before you write, not after a draft you have fallen in love with.
Start by talking, not writing
Before you open a blank document, get two or three people who loved them on the phone or around a table. Ask each one the same question. What’s the first thing you think of when you picture them? You’ll get scenes, not summaries. The way she answered the door. The way he never let anyone pump their own gas. Write those down exactly as people say them.
This is the part that matters most, and it’s the part everyone skips because they’re in a hurry. Ten minutes of asking gives you material that no amount of polishing can invent later.
Get the facts right first
The obituary still has to do its plain job, so nail these before you worry about the good part. Full name, and the nickname everyone used. Age and the town where they lived. The date they died, and if the family wants it, where. The close survivors, and the people who went before them. The service details, or a clear line saying arrangements are private.
Read the names out loud to someone else. A misspelled grandchild is the mistake families remember for years.
The parts that go wrong at the newspaper
Everyone says proofread. Almost nobody says what happens next.
Your deadline is earlier than you think. Weekend and Monday notices usually collapse into a Friday cutoff. Weeklies close days ahead. One Maine paper wants the notice received and paid for by 4 p.m. Tuesday to print on Thursday. And at some papers the funeral home gets a later deadline than you do, because they file every week and you file once.
Somebody may edit your words. Papers reserve the right to cut for length and house style. If a particular sentence is the whole point, say so when you file it.
The proof may not come to you. If the funeral home submits on your behalf, the approval often goes to them. Ask, in writing, to see the proof yourself before it runs.
Fixing a mistake is not free. The usual policy is that the paper reruns its own error at no cost and charges you full price for yours. Read the proof out loud, and read the survivor names twice.
A funeral home may add a handling fee. Under the FTC’s Funeral Rule an obituary notice is a cash advance item, and a home adding a service charge on top must disclose that a fee exists, but it is not required to tell you how big it is. You can usually file directly with the paper yourself and skip it. Ask which you are being quoted.
“Permanent” has a definition. Legacy.com, which carries roughly one in three American obituaries, defines permanent in its own terms as the duration of Legacy.com’s existence, and caps its liability for an error at $100. The useful thing buried in the same terms: you can delete an obituary at any time, free. If your family has one up that you would rather take down, you can.
Four things that should never be in an obituary
This is the part nobody tells you, and it matters more than the writing.
An obituary is a public document, and it is read by people who are not mourning. The FBI’s advice is to give the person’s age but leave out their date of birth, their middle name, their home address, and their mother’s maiden name. Those are the exact answers to security questions, and an obituary hands them over in one place, at the one moment a family is least able to notice a fraudulent account being opened.
The New York Department of State issued a fresh warning about this in June 2026. It is not a rare or historic problem.
There is a second reason, and it is the one people find harder to hear. Published service times tell strangers when a house will be empty. If the obituary names the family’s town and the service hour together, ask someone to be at the house. Police departments have been putting out that advisory for decades.
Find the one true line
Every good obituary has a sentence that could only be about this person. It’s usually specific to the point of being a little odd. He kept a running list of every dog he ever met. She could name a bird by its call before you’d even seen it. He answered the phone “talk to me” for fifty years.
You already heard this line when you were asking around. Put it near the top, not buried in the third paragraph. One concrete detail does more than a paragraph of kind adjectives. If you catch yourself writing that someone was loving, generous, and always there for others, stop and swap it for the thing they did that made you write those words.
Say what they did with their days
Careers matter, but they’re rarely the whole story. Name the job, then say what filled the rest of the hours. The garden. The card game every Thursday. The grandkids picked up from school. The volunteering nobody was supposed to mention. This is where the life happened, and it’s the part readers recognize themselves in.
Keep the sentences short. You’re not writing a résumé and you’re not writing a eulogy. You’re writing something a stranger could read in two minutes and come away feeling like they’d have liked the person.
Cut the phrases everyone uses
Cut the stock phrases. “Fought a courageous battle.” “Will be dearly missed by all who knew them.” “Entered into eternal rest.” They’re not wrong, only worn smooth, and they push the real person off the page. If a line could be pasted into anyone’s obituary, it isn’t earning its space.
You also don’t have to list every relative by name if the list runs long. “His seven grandchildren, who could do no wrong in his eyes” holds more warmth than seven names in a row.
A rhythm that works
If you’re staring at the blank page, this order rarely fails. Open with the name and the one true line. Give the plain facts of the life. Spend a paragraph on what they loved and who they loved. Close with the service details or where to send a donation. Read the whole thing out loud one time. If it sounds like a person talking about someone they miss, you’re done.
An obituary is short because you are paying by the line, and it was never meant to hold everything. The recordings, the photos, the long stories, those live somewhere with more room, and what belongs on a memorial page is a shorter list than most people expect. If you want a place to keep all of it together, that’s what a memorial page is for. But the obituary is where a lot of families start, and getting this one page to sound like the person is worth the extra hour it takes.
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