“Can my proposal be shorter than the page limit?” I get that question more often than I would have ever guessed. Quite a few proposal writers take any page limit as a suggested length. As a result, they worry that they haven’t done a good job if their text runs short. I saw this most often when I worked as proposal manager and had allocated pages to subsections of a large report. That is necessary when you deliver hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of material. But that “allocation” can put your contributing authors back in high school. Remember the assignment to write 800 words about what you did last summer? You wrote everything that you want your teacher to know and you have 600 words to go. That’s when you learn to say more about less. Over the years you develop your own style and eventually you can write 800 words about any topic. Preferably without saying anything. I see it every day. 

“Our innovative approach is cost effective and meets all requirements. Leveraging state-of-the-art techniques and operating procedures revolutionizes how we are accomplishing our goals through maximizing synergies across all subsystems. The result is an elegant solution, delivered on budget and schedule.” If you want to read more of that kind of proposal language, ask you favorite AI chat bot. Read it again and note how strikingly general this fluff is. You can’t tell whether it makes coffee or launches you into space. Possibly both. Does this mean you found the perfect words that can go in any proposal? No, you should avoid this in every proposal. 

I bring this up because teams often struggle with the available space. There is the executive summary that can’t be more than five pages and the latest draft is eight and a half pages long. And the first request I get is: “Do we have to use that 12 point font? It is so clunky that we can barely fit anything on a page. And how about those margins. I think it looks better with half-inch margins all around instead of a full inch.” Luckily, most calls for proposals specify the maximum number of pages, page size, margins, font size and more recently also lines per vertical inch and characters per horizontal inch. I can only imaging the arguments that have led to all these requirements.

I am grateful for these limitations. I am grateful because the last thing any proposal writer wants to do is give up words. The precious words that they have lovingly copied and pasted from other documents with barely a glance at the language of the proposal call. “That’s not what they are asking for? But we have submitted this to the last four proposal calls. Reviewers liked it.” — “But have your proposals been selected?” I tend to say the second part only silently in my head. I haven’t had good results with saying them out loud.

I do get it. It is hard to write compelling prose from scratch that follows the outline of a proposal call. It’s even harder to show reviewers that your approach does everything that is asked for instead of simply asserting it. Once you have climbed that mountain and produced that prose, you are ready to defend every last syllable. Then someone like me comes along and points out that the first three paragraphs of your executive summary don’t include any content other than, in the best case scenario, a paraphrase of the proposal requirements. Did you think that “meeting all requirements” was optional?

Unfortunately, every researcher has a story of that one proposal that they threw together the night before it was due. The one that was barely spell-checked and was twice as long as the page limit. And it was selected. So clearly it is unknowable why some proposals get selected and some don’t and I should just get off their back and let them do it it their way. Every proposal professional has run into these objections. If you are one of them, you know who I am talking about. No, I cannot with certainty predict the outcome of a proposal. But a well argued proposal is as easy to recognize as it is hard to accomplish. So please, write what you have to say. Show rather than tell. Then stop. Because you are not in high school anymore.