Jon and B.J.'s Proposal Blog
Posted by BJ under Word play & writing | 
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My son Rob received some interesting responses when he posted on his Facebook page: – “You and I just woke up in jail together. Using only four words, what do you say to me?”
This prompts me to pose the question, “You and your team have just completed your latest proposal effort. Using only four words, what do you have to say about it?
Posted by BJ under Word play & writing | 2 Comments
While traveling recently I cam upon a sign that read, “We buy cars. Run or No Run. Give you much money.”
As I suspect would be the case for many of you, this immediately struck me as very incorrect language. Obviously, it should have read, “Whether the car is running or not” or something along those lines.
But then I gave this some thought. This sign was posted in an economically challenged area* and one in which the majority of people spoke little to no English. In all probability, using proper English would have resulted in the intended audience not understanding what was being offered.
So, while it might make any of us cringe to read such a sign, it is an excellent example of writing the intended audience.
*No Jon, I wasn’t hanging out in this part of town. I was passing through, having taken detour to bypass a congested highway.
Posted by Jon under Word play & writing | 4 Comments
Fancy a few moments of literary fun? If so, I may have the perfect diversion for you…
“I write like…” is a website that provides a:
statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers
I started by pasting in a few of my fictional short stories (from a collection published earlier this year, available from all good bookstores – not that you know my pseudonym, of course, as I don’t mix business and pleasure!). Apparently, they vary between Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer. (And no, they don’t feature vampires, before you ask!).
Next, to a recent Proposal Guys entry – which apparently reads like Joyce. (Hold on: is my writing here that incomprehensible?). I then threw in a few winning proposals I’ve written in the past year or so. Three of the five examples I tested were apparently in the style of H.P. Lovecraft – described by Stephen King as “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale”. The other two came out as similar to Cory Doctorow, the Canadian sci-fi writer. (OK, so my proposals are scary and deal with entirely imaginary worlds?!).
Although I don’t claim to understand the metrics that lead to the site’s conclusions, or to vouch for the exercise’s scientific validity, it was interesting to see that there’s a fairly consistent style in my fiction writing, and a consistent but different style in the way I write proposals.
Anyone fancy playing? Whose writing is yours most like? And – especially interesting to know – can you spot any trends between winning and losing proposals that you’ve submitted?
Posted by BJ under Word play & writing | 2 Comments
Believing that laughter is a magic ingredient and important for having a good day, my day often begins with a call from Mike P. (he of 24 Hour Company and Billion Dollar Graphics fame) or vise versa with me calling him. The purpose of our call being to share the latest ‘bit’ that either of us has heard and to provide each other a chuckle or two. These are sometimes one’s we’ve heard but that doesn’t matter. This let’s us both start our day with a bit of levity, laughter, silliness, word play, etc.
So I thought I’d share a few of our favorites. (As will be quite evident I’ve no doubt, we’re not terribly discerning, nor are we by any means high brow. But we do have our standards. We keep it clean and non-offensive, both of us knowing that the best humor doesn’t offend and isn’t done at the expense of another.)
A couple of the most recent ones Mike has shared with me:
Question: What did the green grape say to the purple grape?
Answer: Breathe.
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Two sausages are lying next to each other in a frying pan. As the pan heats up, one sausage turns to the other and asks, “Is it just me or is it getting warm in here?”
The other sausage responds with, “Wow. A talking sausage.”
One of my favorites (This is reputed to be one of Johnny Carson’s favorites and I suspect many of you will relate to it.):
On a swelteringly hot day, two hippos are in a river, only their eyes above the water. After an hour or so, one of the hippos slowly raises his head, turns to the other hippo and asked, “Is it really only Tuesday?”
We’re also both big on puns, word play etc. Here are a couple I like a lot and which I shared with Mike recently:
A hearse is driving up a steep hill when the coffin slides backwards, hits the back door and falls out. It slides down the hill, picking up speed and at the bottom of the hill crashes through the front doors of a drug store. The coffin continues through the store, hitting the pharmacy counter, wherein the lid pops up and the body sits up. The druggist looks over the counter and asks, “May I help you?”
The body says, “Yeah. You got anything to stop this coffin’?”
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God gives a young man a slice of lemmings (no, not as in a thin piece of a lemming, “slice” is the correct term for a group of lemmings, in this case let’s say somewhere between 100-150.) and instructs him to take them to a far away city and give them to the King.
The man does as he’s been told and leads the lemmings over hill and dale, through forests and fields. He then comes to a river.
The man tells the lemmings to jump in and swim across.
The first few lemmings jump into the river and immediately sink. The man instructs the other lemmings to stop, jumps in after the ones sinking and pulls them to safety. He then sits down to ponder the situation.
Shortly after this a lovely young maiden comes along. The man explains to the maiden what has happened. The maiden thinks about the situation for a few moments and then tells the man, “Walk beside the river for a ways and find a place where it is shallow enough for the lemmings to walk across.”
The man takes the maiden’s advice. He walks along the river and finds a shallow place where the lemmings and walk across. He then leads the lemmings to the spot and guides them safely across.
The moral of this story…and we all know there’s always a moral to the story, right? “When God gives you lemmings, made lemmings wade.”
Heard a good, clean, cute one, ideally one involving word play or puns? Please do send it to us.
Posted by BJ under Musings, Word play & writing | Add your comment
One of our directors, Graham, related the following.
“I was just hit by my wife Hillary. In hindsight, I deserved it and there is a lesson/reminder for us proposal folks behind the reason for her having reacting to something I said as she did.
I brought home a piece of banana cake that I had left over from my lunch*. Upon taking it out I commented to her, in an attempt to flatter her about her own, quite tasty, banana cake, “this banana cake is a million times worse than yours.”
I was quite taken aback when, rather than smiling and saying, “Thank You’ as I had anticipated her doing, she instead got a funny look on her face. I reiterated that I thought this was indeed ‘a million times worse’, emphasizing the “worse” aspect, lest she misunderstand that I was saying I thought hers was much better. This time, without any hesitation, she slapped my leg… hard too!
She then explained to me (very slowly and rather condescendingly I felt), that what I was saying wasn’t very flattering, as hers was only ‘less worse’ than this ‘worser’ cake.
In hindsight this certainly would have been better received if I’d focused on the positive, saying something along the lines of, “Your banana cake is so much better than this cake.”
As is the case in developing content for proposals, it is always better to “accentuate the positive” (and we certainly don’t want to unintentionally highlight or bring up a negative idea or concept.**
*One does have to wonder, if the banana cake was indeed, “a million times worse’ than the cake Hillary makes Graham, why on earth did you bring it home? :)
** One of the examples we use of this is our workshops is that of a certain US leader (who shall remain nameless but I’ve no doubt you’ll know to whom I’m referring), who, in an attempt to defend himself repeatedly stated, “I did not have relations with that woman.” The words that resonate from this – the unintentional negative – are ‘relations’ and ‘woman’, not what Bill…I mean this unnamed individual…was hoping for. He could have put the emphasis on the positive by saying instead, “I have always been faithful to my wife.” (He’d have been lying, put at least he’d be sending the right message. :) )
Posted by BJ under Word play & writing | 1 Comment
Need a break from working on a proposal? Perhaps a quick game of proposal related Jeopardy would help.
As many/most of you will know/remember, in Jeopardy, your response must be in the form of a question.
As an example:
Answer: A part of an ascent of a mountain that is extremely difficult.
Question: What is “a technical section?”
All questions contain proposal related terms. I’ll post the answers as a comment.
If you have a great proposal related answer/question, we’d love to hear it. Please submit these as a comment.
Here are the answers:
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Easy |
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More Difficult |
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Toughest |
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Have fun…and then get back to that proposal on which you’re supposed to be working!
Posted by BJ under Word play & writing | Add your comment
I recently came across some language within a proposal I was reviewing that, rather than driving home a key point the writer wished to make, actually acted as what I term a ‘speed bump’ for those reviewing the response.
Upon reading the text, it was evident that what the writer wanted to convey was that the action would be taken if the project manager wasn’t in compliance. Unfortunately, as is often the case with the written word, the language used allowed for this to be interpreted a couple of ways and one of them has a negative connotation.
The response read, “If, upon review, the project manager is determined to be non-compliant, we will take action as needed.”
Another example of language having two meanings, in this case those being opposite of what was intended, comes from a response I sent to one of our associates (hi there Rickie). She had raised a concern and I replied, “I will pass on your concern…” As she pointed out, this could be taken as I wasn’t going to address her concern.
I offer these examples as reminders as to why our being careful with the language we use and carefully editing and reviewing content is so critical to the quality of our responses.
