Writing with style

Posted by Jon

I was fascinated to read a review yesterday in The Times of the new edition of their Style Guide, whilst I flew over from London to work with our colleagues in the Netherlands running APMP courses here this week.

This - along with The Economist's equivalent - used to be one of my standard reference manuals when writing proposals. Yet language changes so quickly that, these days, I'd rather use an online version. Any printed document’s going out of date by the time it’s published, and in a few years its advice may not prove to be contemporary. The Guardian's online version is especially good for British English, I find.

Where the arrival of a new Times edition is interesting is therefore less as a go-to guide for daily usage than in the changes since the previous version - which Amazon reminds me that I bought on 7th April 2013, shortly after it was published.

It picks up, for example, on how capitalising words has fallen out of fashion. When I started evaluating and writing proposals, it was common for “the Project Manager to hold a Quarterly Steering Group Meeting at Head Office”. Now, in the UK at least, we don't do that!

It's part of the overall trend towards more conversational content in proposals. Twenty years ago, many read like glorified dissertations or dull project reports. Now, if you can't imagine reading your answer aloud to the client - and it seeming natural, engaging, friendly, professional and appropriate to the audience - it's probably too formal. As BJ has always said, your proposal is a packaged sales presentation - just not one you're in the room in person to talk through.

That's not a call for informal language, mind. One of the worst drafts I've reviewed in recent months had swung too far in the opposite direction, coming across as colloquial, overly informal and patronising. If it reads like a Facebook status update, it's probably too casual. There's a balance to be struck, as in most things. 

And as proposal specialists, more attuned to writing styles than our sales or technical colleagues, it falls to us to continually champion good practice. A great proposal should be a joy to read. When did you last train your proposal specialists to be better writers? And when did you last coach your contributors to write content that’s persuasive and contemporary?