Unsolicited Advice XIV: When crafting an article on how to craft a proposal, overall credibility will be diminished when the word ‘argument’ contains a superfluous ‘e’.

“wouldn’t it be a good idea”.

I was _very_ tempted to say that you could start a stupid ASCII file filling it with selling points and potential weaknesses over any proposal for how to do these methods. So much so, that I eventually gave in.

After all, many heads are better than one, even if it may be better for one person (“you”) to be responsible for the final proposal, to avoid a possible detrimental “designed by committee” effect.

And yeah, looking at it all written up like that, I’d say “Egads” too. But really, it’s less than a half a day of work, and frequently less if you’ve been mulling the ideas over for a while.

- Somebody on the panel has to love the proposal for it to get close enough to the top. You want it to be in the must-do, unique capability category.
- Don’t get bogged down in the details. You do need to nail down the feasibility and dispose of possible weaknesses, but tell a story. Too many proposals are about the properties of Thing X without reminding the non-Xists why they should care about Thing X.
- Don’t put the kitchen sink into the proposal. It gives the reviewers something to argue with.

Also, don’t get teed off when the proposal gets rejected and the comments are moronic. Everybody gets those. It is incredibly annoying, but the main reason your proposal got rejected is that nobody really loved it. Then somebody on the panel wrote down some comments that don’t make sense because they didn’t want to write “I’m sorry, I just didn’t love your proposal enough.”

At the same time, if you’re reviewing MY proposal, I don’t want to see those moronic comments from last cycle!