Spoiler alert: you probably didn’t lose your last bid because of price. It also probably wasn’t because the deal was fixed from the outset. These are the consolations many companies tell themselves when they are unsuccessful in tenders. We get it. You put all your best people on a tender and committed vast amounts of time and resources to it.

Those of us writing business proposals can’t rely on a Hollywood ending. Bid documents require the art of persuasion. That’s more of a challenge for many of us than we would like it to be. So if you’re more concerned about huge grants than Hugh Grant, here are some things to watch out for when writing proposals, bids, and other pieces designed to sell your company to clients.

The importance of good writing in technical grant proposals is significantly underestimated. Have a thought for the grant review committees. Reviewing 40 or 50 grant applications for three or four funding opportunities is depressing enough, but when they are written by scientists, engineers and tech people with few writing skills, it can be agony. Are you surprised that grant proposal reviewers respond better to well-written proposals?

Writing a proposal is hard. There’s rarely enough time to give it the attention you want. You don’t always know much about the client, so you feel like you’re writing in the dark. The client may have an unrealistic budget, meaning your cost will knock you out of the running, no matter how well you’ve described your solution. What’s more, they may already have an awardee in mind and are only going through an RFP process as a formality.

We used PerfectIt, Intelligent Editing's add-in for MS Word that finds inconsistencies, to check 1200 randomly selected documents. Each document was 1500 words or more and was downloaded from the internet. The results were staggering. Everyone knows not to use two different spellings for the same word, but we found that more than a quarter of documents published online did exactly that. The worst offender was 'organise' and 'organize', which came up in more than 10% of all documents (including all the sub-variations, such as 'organization' and 'organizes'). But it was far from the only one. Here's the full top 10.

The first line of defense against consistency errors is simply being aware of them. The Top 10 errors listed below give authors and editors a reminder of important things to check before documents are published. However, the best way to improve consistency in documents is to run PerfectIt.

Most abbreviations do require a definition. In any case where readers might be confused by TLAs (three letter abbreviations), it's important that they be defined in the text or in a Table of Abbreviations. A research proposal or article with complicated and confusing abbreviations is one that will quickly face rejection. The problem is that authors become so familiar with abbreviations that they forget to define them. To test how prevalent the problem is, we used PerfectIt, the add-in for MS Word that locates undefined abbreviations, to check 3000 randomly selected documents.

Language can be a potent force for good—or evil. It matters what we say, and how we say it. And writing matters even more than speech. Our words live on the page long after spoken words are forgotten. 

If you’re bidding for a contract or responding to a request for proposals (RFP), it doesn’t matter whether it’s small or large. From research funding in the thousands to infrastructure in the billions, there’s always a great deal at stake. Whether it’s jobs that depend on a contract or research that can alter lives, the outcomes of proposal documents could not be more significant. That’s why it’s crucial that your words make the best impression.

PerfectIt Cloud brings all of PerfectIt’s checking to Mac and iPad users for the first time. Users will have the same experience using PerfectIt Cloud on any Office 365 device, whether working on Mac, PC, iPad or Word Online. It integrates directly into Microsoft Word via the Office Store.