Spooky

Posted by Jon
​Sometimes a simple word just isn’t good enough for a proposal: your content contributors feel the need to reach for the thesaurus and seek out some extra-flowery alternative.

Take one recent document we reviewed. Apparently, should they win the contract, the supplier’s staff will conduct regular “client visitations” to the customers’ offices.

Having checked the Oxford English Dictionary, I assume they mean this in the context of ‘1. an official or formal visit’. Yet in the context of this project, where creating a sense of partnership was all-important, an air of ‘formality’ isn’t at all what the bidder was seeking to convey.

Moreover, most people would associate a ‘visitation’ with the alternative definitions:

​2. the appearance of a divine or supernatural being.

3. a divorced person’s right to spend time with their children in the custody of a former spouse.

or

4. a disaster or difficulty regarded as a divine punishment.

​None sounds like the proposed meetings would be a joy, although they may be eerily close to the truth of some customer-supplier meetings I’ve attended in the past.

Perhaps they simply meant ‘visit’ – so maybe that’s what they should have written! Proposal managers always need to remind contributors of some of the basic rules of good proposal writing – and encouraging them to keep it simple should certainly be on the list.