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Writing a Proposal

Although writing a proposal requires the same writing process that you use for most other kinds of technical documents, a proposal can be so large that two aspects of the writing process—resource planning and collaboration—are even more important than they are for smaller documents.

Like planning a writing project, discussed in Chapter 5, planning a proposal requires a lot of work. You need to see whether your organization can devote the needed resources to writing the proposal and then to carrying out the project if the proposal is approved. Sometimes an organization writes a proposal, wins the contract, and then loses money because it lacks the resources to do the project and must subcontract major portions of it. The resources you need fall into three basic categories:

Don’t write the proposal unless you are confident that you can carry out the project if you get the go-ahead.

Collaboration is critical in preparing large proposals because no one person has the time and expertise to do all the work. Writing major proposals requires the expertise of technical personnel, writers, editors, graphic artists, managers, lawyers, and document-production specialists. Often, proposal writers use shared document workspaces and wikis. Usually, a project manager coordinates the process.

Proposal writers almost always reuse existing information, including boilerplate such as descriptions of other projects the company has done, histories and descriptions of the company, and résumés of the primary personnel who will work on the project. This reuse of information is legal and ethical as long as the information is the intellectual property of the company.