Gail & Jim Greenwood, Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2000 by Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

Me and Gail decided to right about a realy important topik this month. Me and Gail decided to right about a realy important topik this month.

What was your immediate impression of what you just read? Not too impressed with our bad grammar and misspellings? And how did you feel about having the same thought repeated, word for word?

We are demonstrating here two common errors that we see in SBIR proposals.

First, misspellings, bad grammar, incomplete sentences, and dangling participles in your proposal leave a negative impression with the reviewer. This is especially true when the reviewer does not know you or your company, and is just starting to read your proposal—there’s only one chance to make a good first impression, and you blow that chance by making such careless mistakes. The reviewer sees these errors as possible indicators that your firm is not professional, is careless, or is run by incompetent people—none of those impressions are going to help you get an SBIR award!

Second, repetition of an idea is a good thing, but regurgitation of an idea, word-for-word, is not. We often see SBIR proposals in which sentences and even complete paragraphs that appear in the abstract are repeated in the Identification/Significance section or elsewhere in the proposal. Based on our experience, as soon as the reviewer recognizes that these are the same words, he or she simply skims over the repeated text.

So what? Well, that means you’ve lost a golden opportunity to ensure that you have communicated your thoughts to the reviewer. When you write, for the first time, why this is a great project that the agency ought to fund, you don’t know if the reader agrees with your argument, or even understands what you are trying to say. When you simply repeat the same words in a later section of the proposal, you don’t increase your chances of getting their concurrence or understanding. But if you express the same or a related idea using different words, then you have given yourself a second chance to communicate and resonate with the reader.

We recommend that you use the spell checker capabilities of your word processing software, but don’t rely on it to catch all errors—for example, both "larger" and "lager" are legitimate words to the spell checker, but obviously have very different meanings. We suggest that you get a review of your proposal, before you submit it, by someone who has not been involved in its preparation. That outsider may see things that are not so obvious to the proposal writers who lose their ability to detect errors after they’ve seen multiple iterations of the document..

So iff you thunked that spellling and grammir ain’t important in your SBIR proposal, then you is wrong. Likewise, word-for-word repetition of a sentence or paragraph is bad, repetition of a sentence or paragraph is bad, repetition of a sentence or paragraph is bad………