Fun with Proposal Writing

"Proposal" Chapter Home

"All the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind."

--Winston Churchill, 1953.  In Timeline by Michael Crichton.  New York: Ballentine, 2000.
     

Marriage Proposal: 

            Make a marriage proposal as a group. Break into groups of three to five people and choose group roles (coordinator, writer, reader, timer, and minutes keeper). Then, as a group, pretend you are one person. Write a marriage proposal to someone using the parts or divisions of a proposal listed in this chapter. (If there is time, groups may change roles and become the receivers of the proposals written by other groups, responding to these proposals in formal letter form.) Read the results aloud.

Story--How I Learned to Write Proposals:

            I remember the first time I helped make a successful major proposal.  I was living in Little Falls, Minnesota, a town of 8,000.  I was a freelance writer at the time, writing for magazines, and already involved in small proposal writing: two or three times a month I would write a one-two page proposal to a magazine editor suggesting an article I could write for him or her.  

            However, I had never written a successful proposal for a big cash grant.  I decided to read more on how to write proposals and look at some sample proposals for money.  My chance to help write a proposal for a cash grant came much sooner than I expected.  I ran into Sister Cecelia, a nun with her Ph.D. at the convent in Little Falls, when she and I were shopping at the food co-op.  She told me she was thinking of sending a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a big federal-government foundation in Washington, D.C.  She wanted to start a music program for children.  But, she said, getting a grant from the NEA wasn't easy.  All she wanted was the minimum amount you could ask for, which was $10,000.  But, she said, she had no idea how to do it, and she was thinking of giving up on it.  

            Well, I told her, I had been studying how to write grant proposals, and I would be glad to help her.  She agreed, and we got together a couple of times to go over the materials sent by the NEA.  She wrote an initial draft, and I made a number of suggestions for how she could rewrite some parts, delete some, and add to others.  After a few more drafts, she felt we had it as right as we could.  She sent it in.  Several months later, she called and said that to her surprise and delight, the NEA actually had decided to award the $10,000 to her program.  And, she said, the competition had indeed been very stiff: her proposed music program was one of the very few throughout the whole country at that funding level to be accepted.  She asked me what she could pay me for my help.  I insisted that I needed nothing.  She offered me a night out for dinner, which I gladly accepted.

            Even though I didn't take any pay from her, my study and my practice with Sister Cecelia paid off well later on.  I went on to successfully propose grants for more money than Sister Cecelia requested.  In the largest, I received about $140,000 in cash and $40,000 worth of slightly used computers for the English department in which I worked.  Receiving that grant also gave me a bigger raise that year than most of my colleagues got--my supervisor had been very impressed by my work on the grant.  

            So, the obvious lesson here is that learning to write good proposals pays off.  The less obvious moral of this story is that writing proposals also can be a lot of fun--even with the hard work and research they often require.  The reason for the fun part of it is that you get to change something, to make something new or better.  In other words, you get to make a difference--in your workplace, in people's quality of living, or in your own work life.  This is, after all, how all workplaces, jobs, and businesses are created--through a series of proposals, formal or informal, that build upon each other.  Each one of them starts in the mind of someone who has a good idea and only needs to find a way to propose it. 

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