While winning concepts usually require creative ideas and innovative approaches, the presentation of the concept relies heavily on it’s often maligned cousin, consistency. You may be familiar with the famous misquote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I was all ready to write this article in defense of those adorable creatures, when I saw that the full quote reads: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Well, who would argue in favor of anything foolish?

Consistency, however, is the indispensable ingredient of successful proposal writing. It is the number one way a document can establish credibility. To paraphrase a criticism I have often heard: “If you can’t spell check a factsheet, how can we believe you can launch a rocket?” Let’s pause here for a moment and reflect on this. Does the ability to create a well crafted factsheet really offer evidence that you and your team can launch a rocket? Of course not. But reviewers have no way to judge your ability to launch a rocket, build a bridge, or accomplish anything else in the real world, based on a document. However, they are able to spot a typo easily. So they are using consistency as proxy to assess an unrelated, completely independent ability.

This reminds me of the well known joke about observational bias:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”

While being judged on an unrelated factor is obviously frustrating, reviewers are stuck using these type of proxy factors because you haven’t yet done the work you are proposing. And the easier you are going to make it for reviewers, the more likely they are are to agree with you. 

Let’s look at another example. Is it critically important to your project that you record all your temperatures consistently in degree Celsius instead of switching between Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin as the context demands? Obviously the world is doing this all the time and it all works as long as we pay attention to the context and know which units we are using. But that’s a big caveat. NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter famously failed due to a confusion between metric and US customary units. So look at consistency as the equivalent of wearing clean clothes to a job interview. It is probably not the deciding factor, but it shows that you have made an effort. 

The previous paragraph might lead you to think that you should pay some attention to consistency, but not sweat it too much. When I push for more clarity I sometimes hear: “Oh they will know what we mean.” That’s the equivalent of the lazy professor writing: “Figuring out what we meant here is left as an exercise to the reader.” Most reviewers will soon conclude that they shouldn’t have to work this hard.

More often, though, an argument is so clear in your writer’s mind that they cannot imagine a reader unable to follow it. For those instances, I remind you of an even older admonition to writers. Nearly two thousand years ago one of those Romans wrote: “It is not enough to be understood; make sure that you cannot possibly be misunderstood.” And many others have since picked up the sentiment. 

Put another way, the success of communication is the responsibility of you as the sender. Consistency and clarity are the tools for making your case. Don’t leave them as an afterthought. Build them in from the beginning and keep polishing your document until it seems effortless. Although we all know that how hard it is to get there. But the result is worth it, because reviewers can only look where the light is.