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.