9 Fluff, Guff, Geek, and Weasel: The Art of Saying What You Mean S READERS, WE ALL KNOW WHAT WE LIKE: CON- ciseness. Clarity. Simplicity. Unfortunately, when we sit down to write, we too often fail to deliver anything like that. We produce lengthy, ver- bose, and complicated documents. Especially when writing proposals, many people subscribe to the "bulk" theory. Pile on the paper and the reader will give in out of sheer exhaustion. Got some documentation? Throw it in there! Got some testing plans? Throw them in, too! Put it all in. Who knows--if we put enough stuff in our proposal, something is bound to click with the evaluator and we'll get the job. That's ridiculous, of course. When we lard our proposals will irrele- vant junk, we irritate the reader and make it more difficult for him or her to find the content that actually matters. To my knowledge, nobody has ever made a buying decision based on the thud factor--which pro- posal makes the loudest noise when dropped on the desk. It's true, of course, that an analytical decision maker will want quite a bit of detail, but even for the analytical reader the details must be focused and rele- vant. Details in and of themselves have no value. In a simple experiment we conducted, we asked people who make their living evaluating proposals to review three sample proposals. Actu- ally, we weren't interested in their reviews at all. We just wanted to see which proposal they picked up first. One of them was 25 pages long, one was 50 pages, and one was 100 pages. Which one do you think they reached for first? That's right--the short one. Why does that matter? Well, let's suppose that you produced the short proposal. And you organized it using the NOSE pattern, so you have focused on the client's Needs, detailed their Outcomes, recom- mended a Solution, and substantiated with convincing Evidence that you can do the job on time and on budget. In addition, you've devel- oped a payback calculation that's quantified and based on the client's own data, and you've linked that payback both to your differentiators American Management Association www.amanet.org A 93