Does your proposal sing?

Today I attended a free online webinar sponsored by GrantHub and presented by Maryn Boess of GrantsMagic U. The webinar was called “Power Writing for Grants and More”. I have followed Maryn for a long time, and have taken some of her courses. It is always a pleasure to listen to Maryn:, she has the gift of clarity and always has practicality in mind. As usual, even in this free webinar Maryn provided much information packed in such a short time. I put down a few notes to share, little big  rules of great proposal writing: 

Make your proposal SING: Stop writing dull, dry, boring proposals. 

Write to express not to impress: show you have strength of ideas and clarity of thinking.

Replace inflated words (puffed up words) with simpler, more familiar words that express the same meaning of technical or unusual words, and do not require a big effort on the part of the reviewers.

Use often your first-choice words = don’t be afraid of repetition (This was one of my favorite). 

Liberate “buried verbs”. For instance instead of “It seems to me that it would be possible”, say more simply “It is possible” OR instead of “We took into consideration a number of factors…” say “We considered (number) factors”. We all do that, a longer sentence seems more clever, it is not in 99% of cases.

OUTLINE OUTLINE OUTLINE: outline your ideas before you start writing. I would also add, establish your purpose before stating writing and decide based on purpose what sequence or chain of thoughts and actions will get you there.