A proposal is an important document that is useful when creating an initial professional relationship between an organization and a donor over a project to be implemented. A poorly written proposal can lead to a donor not considering your project and rejecting your bid.
To avoid getting your proposal rejected, you need to edit it carefully. Editing helps correct any document errors that would put off a donor. The best and most prominent companies edit their proposals to ensure high quality.
Editing process
The reason for not editing proposals is that there is a very short time frame for developing a proposal. Despite all the proposals manager’s efforts, a proposal calendar often slips to the right due to unavoidable delays in the proposal process. When these inevitable delays happen, the time you initially set for proposal editing is used up to complete other proposal processes.
Eliminating the editing process in a proposal is a great mistake you should avoid. Editing provides the final polish to your proposal. An edited proposal is taken seriously because it tells a consistent story throughout out, and also, it is professionally written.
After a post-read team inserts review comments, a proposal is ready for final editing. At this stage, the proposal is 95-100% complete. This normally means that the final proposal document should be ready by 48-72 hours. During this stage, an editor must deal with all the missing information in the proposal to tell a credible and compelling story. Also, you must deal with all unanticipated issues like grammatical mistakes and punctuation errors.
Advantages of proposal editing
Proposal editing is essential when writing a formal proposal. Although editing can be time-consuming and most people avoid it, it has some advantages, which include:
- Telling you if your content is sensible or too technical.
- Ensures the main message matches what you intend to say.
- It presents an alternative way of writing that you can consider.
- Improves your writing efficiency
Common proposal errors
Just like any other form of writing, proposals also have errors. During the writing of a proposal, writers may have errors, such as:
- Lacks internal consistency
- Multiple spelling mistakes
- Grammatical errors
- It does not conform to any proposal style guide
These errors may lead to the rejection of a proposal. The editing team needs to proofread the entire proposal and make sure the final proposal document is perfect.
As mentioned before, editing time may be consumed by other proposal processes. One way to perform the editing process after the 48- 72 hours are lost is to have the editor work on it during writing breaks. This allows the editor to stay updated with the proposal, maintain consistency, correct grammatical errors, and apply the style guide. Then, the editor can deal with sections affected by the delay in the final hours before submitting it.
Proposal editing is a crucial stage in the process of proposal writing. A well-written and edited proposal increases the chances of winning a tender or a contract because it shows you can handle any task.