Did they really write that?
Thanks to one of our friends, who runs the proposal team for a major financial institution, for emailing us an extract from a recent proposal, which she thought might entertain readers here. Names changed to protect the guilty!
“Practically we would see this working as XYZ initially offering all of your ABC business to us as cases come up for renewal and you seek new opportunities, however we know that in today’s dynamic and competitive market place we may not always be able to meet your’s and your clients needs so we believe the preferred partner status gives you the flexibility to work with us but also to benchmark other providers either on specific cases or specific classes of business where the clients demands and needs cannot be satisfied by our programme.”
Yes, folks, that’s 94 words. As I always say, if you read the sentence aloud and run out of breath, it’s way too long!
And here’s another gem we received recently, again reproduced with permission, this time from a bid to provide roadside breakdown assistance to car manufacturers:
“We have extensive experience in managing large-scale implementations and have accumulated huge learnings over the years. One key learning is that, despite the fact that we are engaged in an implementation, people will continue to to break down on the roads and require our assistance.”
A key learning? As the friend who sent us the quote commented, “Presumably, before the lightbulb moment, they were working on the assumption that breakdowns would cease to during the implementation.”
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There was a recent programme on Radio 4 on the development of language, particularly in relation to “texting”.
There were two things that I found interesting. Firstl was the rise in 160 poetry where poems are created in 160 characters or less. Second was the rise in Japan of entire stories that can be sent in short text messages.
So what has this got to do with anything? Well, if you only have 160 characters to convey a message or a story it makes you think about your words very carefully. Everyone of them has to matter – you certainly don’t end up with a 94 word sentence.
The page should be considered expensive real estate where words are valued and thought given to each one.
I wonder what a “160 proposal” would look like, though I dnt cr fr th spllng 2 mch.
Oh, and if you are interested to see what a 160 poem reads like then your may be interested to know that in 2002 Emma Passmore won £1,500 with this:
I left my pictur on th ground wher u walk
so that somday if th sun was jst right
& th rain didnt wash me awa
u might c me out of th corner of yr i & pic me up
Hi, James
Great comment and good to hear from you here.
I’ve been following this Japanese text-novel craze for some time – it feels a little like twitter committed to paper. Strange idea, but incredibly popular over there.
You might also enjoy BJ’s post on “In 50 words or less”, which covers not dissimilar ground:
http://www.theproposalguys.com/2009/03/06/in-50-words-or-less/
Jon