The Pursuit of Perfection: Editing Your Proposal 209 had writers and editors working for me whose only standard was "per- fect." It took a while for them to understand that even the most strin- gent quality-control processes don't set perfection as their goal. Instead, the goal should be excellence. We want to deliver a proposal to our client that is truly excellent, that is in the top 1 or 2 percent of all the propos- als he or she receives. To define excellence, we can consider six levels of "correctness," list- ing them in order of increasing difficulty of achievement: 1. There are no mechanical, spelling, or punctuation errors and no typos. 2. There are no obvious errors of facts, content, or logic that the reader will notice immediately. 3. The proposal follows an effective and appropriate structural pat- tern and has been adequately divided into functional units so that the reader can understand and use the proposal easily. 4. The proposal writing is clear and concise, free of needless jar- gon, ambiguities, or possible misinterpretations. 5. The proposal has been slanted correctly in terms of the primary audience's level of expertise, personality, and values, and fully meets that audience's needs. 6. The proposal is complete, informed, and intelligent, written in a crisp and interesting style, and delivered in a format that makes it easy to use for multiple evaluators. So--how good is good enough? Lots of technical or business profes- sionals are satisfied if their documents reach level 2. If it gets by on the first reading, it's good enough for them. From a reader's point of view, however, nothing less than level 4 will do. And for a proposal, where the reader is making a buying decision, you shouldn't tolerate anything less than level 5. Editing: A Five-Step Process Perhaps an even more important issue than how much editing you should do is how you should do it. Most people were never taught true editing skills. Instead, they were threatened with F's if their papers con- tained more than three misspelled words, so what they learned to do was proofread. Proofreading is part of editing, the final step before you print and deliver the proposal, but it's not the whole job. It's also not likely to im- prove the overall quality of your proposal nor is it likely to help you American Management Association www.amanet.org