Description
The polished, professional appearance of your proposal is paramount to making a positive impression on evaluators.
You will learn how to work with subject matter experts (SME) and edit their content to meet proposal requirements. You will practice editing for clarity and meaning, sharpen your ability to spot factual errors and redundancies, and organize unfocused materials.
You will also learn how to infuse a consistent voice throughout your proposal regardless of the number of authors involved.
This course is not another English grammar class. This hands-on workshop is filled with examples and exercises that will help you master the techniques for rapid and accurate editing using commonly available tools and professional editing applications.
This interactive two-day workshop is 40 percent lecture, 50 percent exercises, and 10 percent discussion. It will teach you the real skills required to increase quality, professional appearance, and persuasiveness of your proposals.
The experts who teach our business development, capture, and proposal training courses are highly experienced currently practicing proposal professionals whose years of successful experience in Government acquisition and training allow them to offer valuable insights to our students. Our instructors can answer tough questions as they come up during the course. They can also tailor the material to their students’ specific challenges, and share their experience based on the most current realities. Check our instructor’s bios on our About Us page.
Course Curriculum
Learning Objectives
Upon course completion, the participants will have learned and be able to put into practice:
- Understanding a proposal editor’s role and key attributes.
- Understanding compliance.
- Assessing material and estimating resources required to edit sections.
- Optimizing editing time and workflow in a team of editors to save resources.
- Using electronic editing tools and professional hard copy markings.
- Avoiding typical editing traps and mastering editing techniques to ensure a perfectly clean copy.
- Editing content for clarity, compliance, customer language, accuracy, and persuasiveness.
- Editing for content while preserving author’s meaning.
- Improving the substance of the proposal.
- Reducing page count without sacrificing content.
- Adhering to the requirements of the Plain English Act.
- Automating proposal editing to increase efficiency.
- Editing resumes and past performance for length and compelling, relevant language.
- Catching showstopper mistakes.
- Improving readability while satisfying technical evaluators.
- Effective workflow tracking.
Day 1 Highlights
Module 1: What it Takes to Be a Stellar Proposal Editor
- Introductions and learning objectives.
- The proposal editor’s role in the proposal lifecycle.
- Attributes of a great proposal editor.
- Mastering diplomacy, providing constructive feedback, and fostering teamwork.
- How an editor can have the greatest impact on proposal quality.
Module 2: Setting Up for Success
- Introduction to styles: working with GPO, Chicago, and other style guides.
- Checking what style is used for the proposal.
- Creating a proposal-specific style guide for the proposal team.
- Understanding compliance – how to quickly grasp the structure of the solicitation.
- Exercise: Customizing style guide template for your proposal team.
Module 3: Estimating Your Effort and Time
- Identifying different levels of editing.
- Assessing the material for content, organization, and writing style.
- Skills and effort that different levels of editing require from a proposal editor.
- Estimating time and effort required to edit the assigned workload.
- Optimizing editing time to save resources while achieving the most professional results.
- Determining workflow when working in a team of editors.
- Exercise: Estimate the time required to edit the assignment and plan your work.
Module 4: Editing Mechanics
- Using MS Word’s Track Changes and Compare Documents tools effectively.
- Developing a systematic approach to electronic editing.
- Tracking and merging changes by multiple reviewers.
- Editing electronic section copy: secrets to clean and clear editorial feedback.
- Editing hard copy: professional editorial markings glossary.
- Microsoft Word shortcuts for increased speed and efficiency.
- Typical editing traps and how to avoid them.
- Four additional editing techniques to ensure a perfectly clean editing copy.
- Exercise: Practice and compare the application of two different techniques to demonstrate a difference in editing quality.
Module 5: Substantive Editing
- Maximizing clarity and compliance with the outline and RFP.
- Reintroducing RFP and customer’s language.
- Identifying and eliminating irrelevant boilerplate.
- How to avoid distorting author’s meaning.
- Flagging inconsistencies, incomplete information, and ambiguity.
- Adding benefits and proof language to improve persuasive qualities of the proposal.
- Translating “technicalese” to English: correcting imprecise wording, technical arrogance and lecturing, redundancy, garbled language, confusing thoughts, unknown acronyms, and incomplete information.
- Spotting and correcting factual inaccuracies that could kill your section’s rating.
- Pinpointing areas that need work.
- Revising or reorienting figures and tables.
- Exercise: Edit section for content.
Day 2 Highlights
Module 6: Structural Editing
- How to cut down the text length to fit within the assigned page limit without sacrificing content.
- Editing for better section flow.
- Restructuring for more persuasive and proportionate paragraph flow.
- Revising introductory sentences.
- Organizing unfocused material.
- Revising for consistent voice even if multiple writers contributed to proposal development.
- Properly introducing figures and tables.
- Exercise: Edit section for length and structure.
Module 7: Copy Editing and Proofreading
- Plain English Act’s impact on proposal writing and editing.
- Four editing automation techniques to increase editing speed and leverage modern editing tools.
- Using spelling and grammar tools effectively.
- Making global changes and using Find and Replace effectively.
- Techniques to improve proposal readability while satisfying technical evaluators.
- Eliminating passive voice, or deciding if and when passive voice is appropriate.
- Identifying vague, redundant, or overused words or expressions.
- Grammar gaffes every proposal editor should heed.
- Grammar and punctuation refresher for the most common proposal errors.
- Making finer adjustments such as tone and rhythm.
- Editing, titling, and captioning figures and tables for maximum impact.
- Ensuring consistency in style for every occurrence.
- Exercise: Copy-edit the section for sentences and words.
Module 8: Editing Resumes and Past Performance Sections
- Rules for cutting proposal resumes to the right page count.
- Editing past performance sections for compliance, relevancy, length, and consistency.
- Workflow tracking tools to ensure you are always organized.
- Working with authors to provide the missing information.
- Exercise: Edit a set of resumes.
Module 9: Last Touches
- Ten items to check in a proposal for consistency and professional appearance.
- What to look for when editing for aesthetics to catch desktop publishing errors.
- Techniques for finalizing the copy.
- Comparing hard copy edits to the final document to ensure all changes are made correctly and no new errors are introduced.
- Generating an acronyms table using tools.
- Checking on numbering for figures and tables, and cross-references.
- Cleaning up style sheets for fast and reliable formatting.
- Generating or updating the table of contents.
- Exercise: Identify the items requiring correction prior to proposal production.
