Fire! Fire!
Listening to the radio on a long drive recently, I heard a spectacular example of the misuse of pre-written content. Not proposal material, thankfully – rather a news story from last year about application forms submitted by students wishing to study medicine at UK universities.Apparently, candidates now have to submit a ‘personal statement’ describing why they are applying for the course in question.
Amazingly, it seems that pre-written ‘personal’ statements can be downloaded from the web.
And astonishingly, as a result, no fewer than 234 prospective students wished to follow a career in medicine as the result of
‘a dramatic incident’ involving ‘burning a hole in pyjamas at age eight’.
This is also about as bad as it gets in terms of failing the “me too” test. When I’m working with proposal teams, I sometimes swap out their organisation’s name for that of their closest competitor throughout their text. This simple trick often proves to be a very powerful means of getting contributors to realise that they need to dig deeper to look for real competitive differentiators.
This article was written by Jon and filed under Musings, Word play & writing. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
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Wow. I find it disturbing (on so many levels) that this was the pre-written content that appealed to so many applicants.