Monday, February 4, 2008
Editing Gone Wild
While editing a response to an RFP and well into “editing” mode, I came upon a paragraph which was very poorly written, unclear and needed a complete rewrite.
I did just that. I took the time to understand what the paragraph was really trying to say. I then rearranged the order of the information, restructured several of the sentences and completely rewrote others. When I was done, I would say, at the risk of sounding conceited, that the paragraph was much clearer and easier to understand, and it was written well and correctly.
It was only after I had completed this exercise that I realized the paragraph was part of the RFP and not the response. As Charlie Brown would say, “Arrrrgggh!” Maybe this has happened to you. You have become so caught up in editing or worked with an RPF that was so poorly written, that you’ve inadvertently edited the RFP. Please tell me I’m not the only one who’s done this. (And yes, sadly, this is not the first time it’s happened to me.)
I would point out that any one who has a bit of time in the proposal game has surely come across an RFP that was poorly written and very unclear. Such RFPs, and the one I’ve described above in particular, would have benefited greatly from some of Jon’s expertise in developing effective RFPs. As he’s said many a time to a buyer (and this is also the name of a course Jon presents), “You get the response you deserve.”
Hah! Too funny. I am sure many of us have WANTED to rewrite the RFPs we receive. I have noticed that some large companies with top-notch RFP response departments put out some of the worst RFPs. I always wonder why they don’t hire the same caliber of talent to write their RFPs as they do to respond to outside RFPs. Don’t they realize they are sending this abominable document to an elite group of writing and grammar snobs within the companies they want to do business with?
I have done this on more than one occassion. One particularly long and hard day, I only discovered the glaring error of my ways after a half hour of searching through previous versions of my matrices for the culprit, convinced I had dropped a line.
Agreed! And to Barbara’s point, why don’t they enlist the expertise of their RFP response departments to help them write better RFPs?!?! This is a nugget of advice I also included in my recent panellista response that should be posted soon. : )