Tips for writing a eulogy
Fifteen things that genuinely help, gathered in the order you will need them — and, at the end, four pieces of very common advice that make eulogies worse.
Last updated 16 June 2026
Before you write
- Ask how long you have before you write a word. One message to the funeral director saves you from cutting something you love. Three to five minutes is the usual answer.
- Find out who else is speaking, and what they will cover. Four people telling the room who the deceased was, one after another, is the most common failure at a funeral.
- Collect fragments before you write sentences. Fifteen minutes, twenty small things, no judgement. What they always said, what their car smelled like, what they complained about happily for years.
- Ask other people narrow questions. “What did she do that annoyed you?” produces gold. “What should I say?” produces nothing.
- Pick a structure before you start. Most people who are stuck are not short of memories — they are forcing them into the wrong shape. There are six to choose from on eulogy structure.
While you write
- Write the first draft badly, on purpose. Forty minutes, start to finish, no going back. Type [something about the garden here] and keep moving. Editing and writing use different attention and grief has taken most of it.
- Replace every adjective with an example. This is the single highest-value edit available. “Kind” becomes the thing she actually did on a Tuesday.
- Include one honest imperfection. A stubbornness, a grudge, a thing they could not be told. It is what makes the affection believable — a eulogy with no flaws in it sounds like it is about a stranger.
- Keep sentences short enough to say in one breath. You are writing speech, not prose. Read anything long out loud and you will hear the problem immediately.
- Start each story at the action. Everything before “he said” or “she walked in” is usually throat-clearing, and cutting it often saves a full minute.
- Name people who are in the room. Crediting a memory to someone sitting there makes it land twice and quietly tells everyone the family has been talking.
- Leave one small thing unexplained. A detail you never resolve makes a eulogy sound remembered rather than composed.
Before you finish
- Read it aloud, standing, with a timer. Silent reading runs at about twice speaking pace and will tell you something comforting and wrong. Cut anything you stumble over twice.
- Find your real ending and delete what follows. Most drafts land, then carry on for another paragraph. The sentence that gives you a physical reaction is almost never the last one you wrote.
- Show it to one person, not five. One trusted reader catches the line that will upset someone. Five readers produce five contradictory edits and a eulogy written by committee.
Four pieces of common advice to ignore
“Open by thanking everyone for coming”
It costs you the most valuable seconds you have and signals that what follows will be generic. The thanks belong at the end of the service, usually from someone else. Open with something specific about the person instead.
“Practise it dozens of times”
Past about five full read-throughs, delivery flattens into recitation and you lose the quality that moves a room. Three is right: one to find the problems, one to time it, one to know where the difficult sentence is.
“Include their full life story”
Dates, schools, job titles and a roll-call of surviving relatives are obituary material, and most of it is already printed in the order of service. A eulogy is two or three moments told properly. Nobody has ever wished a eulogy had contained more employment history.
“End with a poem”
A borrowed passage at the close replaces your voice with a stranger’s at the exact moment the room most wants yours. If a poem genuinely belonged to them, introduce it as theirs and let it be a separate reading. More on this on how to end a eulogy.
If you are struggling to start at all
Numbness is normal and it is not a measure of how much you loved them. Grief flattens memory for a while, and trying to summon feeling on demand makes it worse.
The way through is to stop reaching for meaning and answer small factual questions: what did their handwriting look like, what did they order in a restaurant, what was in their car. Detail returns before feeling does — and the detail is the part you actually need on the page.
If it still will not come, write it as a text message to a friend. Type “you know what Dad was like, he used to…” and keep going. The register you are aiming for is much closer to that than to writing.
Where to go next
Our step-by-step guide to writing a eulogy walks through the whole thing in six steps, from a blank page to something you can say out loud. How to deliver a eulogy is about the lectern — your voice, your hands, and what to do if you break down. Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Eulogy templates gives you four fill-in templates, each shown blank and then completed.