Understanding and Categorizing Proposals

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We live in an era of big proposals — complex programs for health care reform, bold dreams to privatize space exploration, multibillion-dollar designs for high-speed rail systems, ceaseless calls to improve education, and so many other such ideas brought down to earth by sobering proposals for budget reform and deficit reduction. As a result, there’s often more talk than action because persuading people (or legislatures) to do something — or anything! — is always hard. But that’s what proposal arguments do: they provide thoughtful reasons for supporting or sometimes resisting change.

Such arguments, whether national or local, formal or casual, are important not only on the national scene but also in all of our lives. How many proposals do you make or respond to in one day? A neighbor might suggest that you volunteer to help clean up an urban creek bed; a campus group might demand that students get better seats at football games; a supervisor might ask for ideas to improve customer satisfaction at a restaurant; you might offer an ad agency reasons to hire you as a summer intern — or propose to a friend that you take in the latest zombie film. In each case, the proposal implies that some action should take place and suggests that there are sound reasons why it should.

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In their simplest form, proposal arguments look something like this:

Proposals come at us so routinely that it’s not surprising that they cover a dizzyingly wide range of possibilities. So it may help to think of proposal arguments as divided roughly into two kinds — those that focus on specific practices and those that focus on broad matters of policy. Here are several examples of each kind:

Proposals about Practices

Proposals about Policies