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Subject:Proposal Writing: Second Person vs. Third Person From:"Chalmers, Eric" <Eric -dot- Chalmers -at- westgroup -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 9 Mar 2001 10:29:33 -0600
A few months ago there was a very lively discussion on this list regarding
proposal writing. At the time the discussion didn't have much bearing on my
life--I was a technical writer working on user manuals, help documentation,
and system specs. I found the proposal discussion to be informative, but
not anything that I needed to pay much attention to. Fast forward three
months and things look a heck of a lot different.
Today I am a technical writer working on proposals. I work with a group of
lawyers who are responsible for responding to RFPs from federal and state
agencies. My new group has never worked with a technical writer before, so
they're still trying to figure out exactly what they can trust me to do
around here. Fortunately, things are going very well.
My first responsibility in this group is to develop a document repository
that contains up-to-date descriptions of products and services we offer to
our customers. Many of the existing descriptions my group uses are out of
date to one degree or another. Also, almost all of the descriptions have
been cut and pasted from other documents (e.g., marketing pieces, functional
specs), so there isn't much in the way of consistency.
I recently started working on the first update. Of course, I fell back on
my nine years of technical writing experience and began writing everything
in the second person--talk to your readers, not at them, right? I sent out
the first document for review and got a lot of positive feedback. I also
got feedback (from my boss) that said change it from second person to third
person and apply this change to all future documents. This runs contrary to
my training, so I'm not all that inclined to do this.
I'm wondering if the other proposal writers out there have any thoughts
about writing in the second person rather than the third person. My take is
that writing in the second person helps make the documents more approachable
from the reader's standpoint. The more approachable the document is, the
more likely it is to get read.
Am I off track here? Are employees at federal and state agencies looking
for third person documents? Does writing in the third person make documents
look more professional? What are you doing in your proposals?
Eric Chalmers
Government Contracts Technical Writer
IPCC 01, the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference,
October 24-27, 2001 at historic La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
CALL FOR PAPERS OPEN UNTIL MARCH 15. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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