Improving Proposal Writing by Looking to Information Operations

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This article examines the subject of persuasion in technical and professional communications (TPC) with a specific focus on proposals in U.S. Government contracting. It demonstrates a fundamental disconnect between the intent of proposals, which is to persuade, and the rhetorical traditions and professional boundaries of technical writers. The analysis draws on the existing rhetorical- and genre-based TPC literature and borrows from theory in other disciplines—management, organizational theory, sociology, and psychology among others. To advance the scholarship on proposals, this analysis is framed within the overall context of a structural analogy to U.S. military Information Operations (IO). Through use of analogy, it is suggested that the IO community's approach to the concepts of “influence,” “narrative,” “target audience,” and “unity of effort” may offer useful insight for State and Federal contractors to consider in their efforts to write persuasive proposals. This analysis is then used to develop a research agenda for the study of proposals. Areas for future research include the science of persuasion and the use of narrative as it relates to proposals, improved rigor in the use of target audience research, and organizational constructs to improve collaborative writing in proposals.