Convinced She’s Write

Things learned in writing a proposal

January 5th, 2012

Writing a proposal for work. Realizing I overuse the following words:
- key
- capability
Wishing I knew a way to get Word to give me a word frequency picture, so I could see where I’m bludgeoning someone with ‘and this is key, and a key concept, and a key capability’…

My overall writing and editing process works out something like the following:
- brain dump which has half-formed thoughts, extraneous details, and not quite reasonable flow… gathering raw materials, basically
- edit for flow: what ideas need to hit full force, in what order?
- edit for wording: my first dump of words is usually too long and needs to be written to not be so lengthy / imposing / voluminous. (See, I need to edit this post for wording!)

I was mean and pushed out the roughest rough draft to a few members of my team today to make sure I was heading to some sort of reasonable realm. Good feedback from one team member in particular, and need to make sure I laud her in the right circles at work. My ulterior motive in letting some see “raw raw” is to show how rough and dirty these things start, so someone itches to show how they can do it better. Nothing like showing a low entry bar to suck folks in past the ‘oh, I couldn’t do that’ kind of idea….. Leadership gamesmanship of a sort…

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