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|  | Just The Facts If you're old enough, you may remember the TV cop show Dragnet that ran in the fifties and then again in the late sixties (if you're too young, you can see the show now and again on Nick at Night). Its premise was to show what being a cop was really like. No glamour, but humdrum reality. The main character, Sgt. Joe Friday, when confronted with excited witnesses and hysterical victims would say, “Just give us the facts. Just the facts.” When I teach technical writing, that’s what I tell my students. Just give us the facts; no bias, no spin. That’s what good technical writing is all about. But that approach doesn’t work with proposals. Proposals need more than that. When I teach my proposal classes, I always start with a little quiz: A proposal is (pick one): A. A technical document B. A marketing document C. A sales document D. All of the above Some in the class might pick B, and others might pick C. Most pick D. (I’m not giving away the answer; click the link above and find out what the “real” answer is). But no one has ever, in all the classes I have taught, said that the answer is A. Everyone who writes a proposal knows that the purpose is not to prepare a technical report. A proposal is not just a recitation of the facts. Then why do so many proposal sections read like technical reports? Look at this from an IT proposal:
3.4 Package Selection Phase The purpose of this phase is to research, select, and assist with the acquisition of package software based on the client's application requirements. The Package Selection phase supports the evaluation, selection, and acquisition of the package software. Its intent is to lead the team through the necessary activities up to the purchase of the selected software. The major activities focus on:
Assisting with vendor negotiation. After selecting the desired vendor, negotiations with s/w vendors must occur in order to obtain a favorable software contract. This is a proposal? From this you expect the customer to BUY what you are SELLING? None of you reading this would say that it is an effective proposal section. You’d say that it is a dry technical description of the work that is usually done in what the author calls the “Package Selection Phases”. It’s a boring description of what people do. Who cares what you do? As the customer, I want to know WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO DO FOR ME, WHY IT’S GOOD FOR ME, AND HOW IT’S DIFFERENT THAN WHAT ANYONE ELSE SAYS THEY’LL DO FOR ME! The whole point of a proposal is to sell your approach, not explain your approach. You can’t sell by just citing the facts. You’ve got to spin the facts the way the customer wants them spun, use the facts to tell the story that will sell your approach over all the other approaches the customer reads about in all the other proposals. This ain’t Dragnet, and your customer ain’t Joe Friday; just the facts won’t do. < Return to Proposal Writing Techniques < Return to Articles
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