Chapter 16 — Proposals and Progress Reports

Chapter 16 of Houp/Pearsall/Tebeaux's Reporting Technical Information, 9th ed. (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1997) discusses contents, organization, and format for proposals and progress reports and strategies for developing these types of reports. Accompanying the textbook, this chapter of the online instructor manual provides the following:

Chapter Objectives — Proposals

• Understand the functions and varieties of proposals used in the professional world.

• Know the logic of the contents and organization of proposals.

• Know the formatting and style options for proposals.

• Produce professional-looking proposals.

• Prepare successful proposals, ones that win contracts or gain approval for the projects they propose.

The proposal is one of the most interesting and challenging writing applications in a technical writing course. The proposal gets right to the heart of what this course is about—or should be. The proposal is a problem-solving document; it addresses intensely practical matters; it must demonstrate a sound approach to a project; it must have a positive, convincing impact on the reader; and its success has everything to do with the success of organizations, communities, and individuals within them.

You can "sell" students on the proposal by emphasizing that it is a critical document that professionals use to get work. It's not only used externally by independents but also internally within organizations. As organizations increasingly use the supplier/customer model, they speak of hiring the "vendor of choice" supplier—even if it means going outside the organization. Most students enjoy imagining themselves as independent consultants; encourage students to create their own company names and fancy letterhead logos.

Proposal contexts. But how to recreate anything like this social and professional context in our classrooms? Few students have real workplace projects to bring with them to the technical writing classroom; and the ones that do have a marvelous experience in which education and workplace are bound tightly together. It may be impractical to ask students to scurry all over campus and all over town looking for problems to fix and projects to launch—like modern-day Don Quixote's rattling about town in their aging Geos.

One alternative to sending students into the streets is to engage in what might be called practical fantasizing. Consider the student who wants to write about global warming. Great, but for whom and why? "An informational report for anybody who is concerned about global warming"—that's not the right answer! But consider this bit of practical fantasy work: an association of coastal real-estate developers is curious about the gloom-and-doom predictions involving global warming. If those predictions are even half-true, there will be a huge impact on their business and investments. To get some answers, they send out proposal requests to experts on the subject. Enter your student (cast as the expert consultant). This practical fantasizing can be fun for students. They make up their own consulting firms, for which they, of course, are the CEOs; and they relish deciding on their hourly rates and per-diems!

Another alternative to the problem of proposal contexts is to use your course as the context. The proposal need not be a "realistic" document in the sense of a project somewhere in the "real world" that students are bidding on. Students can address the proposal directly to you, the instructor. Their proposals can seek to convince you of the viability of their report-project ideas. An example of this approach in shown in Research Report Proposal, Sample Assignment 1.

Definitions of proposals. One problem with proposals is that they mean different things to different people. Ensure that students understand the term "proposal" as it is used in Reporting Technical Information: a document that seeks approval, funding, or contract to do a project. It may contain other material, but that is supporting material designed to convince the audience that the writer is qualified to do the proposed work.

Some students mistake the "great idea" report for the proposal. For example, an enthusiastic student wants to do a "proposal" on a great idea for installing those inexpensive video and audio devices on computers to enable direct communication through intranet web pages (wouldn't it be great!). The student wants to show how this great idea would work, how much it would cost, and what its advantages would be. Without dampening this enthusiasm, we have to find ways to help students like these understand that this great idea is not a proposal. It's more of a feasibility project. However, this idea can be turned into a proposal. With some practical fantasizing, the student can imagine that an organization has sent out an RFP for a feasibility study on using audio/video equipment in conjunction with intranet web facilities. To get the job, this student needs to write a proposal.

Boilerplate thinking about proposal structure. Another problem with the proposal is to find a way to get students to understand the internal logic of the proposal and get beyond an unthinking, boilerplate approach to its contents and organization. Students also need to understand the wide variability of proposal contents and organization. They need to understand that one proposal may necessitate theoretical background; another may not. One proposal may discuss the procedures to be used in the proposed work; another may not. To address this variability, get the class to brainstorm several hypothetical proposals, exploring which contents would be needed and which contents would not.

Confusion between proposals and reports. One more problem with proposals is that some students just can't seem to conceptualize the proposal and keep getting it mixed up with the technical report. Typically, these students will find themselves writing the final report, or some sort of technical report, thinking it's the proposal. Indeed, proposals provide some background on the problem being addressed or on the theory and procedure to be used in the proposed work. Sometimes, proposals provide a glimpse of the work to be done. But only a glimpse. Typically, students will complain that they just can't write the proposal without more time for research and that they feel like they are having to write the final report. That's where you can provide the proper perspective on how background information or previews of results and recommendations function in a proposal.

Here are some classroom ideas for helping students learn about proposals:

1. Give the initial quiz. Try giving the quiz on proposals at the beginning of this unit. It's a nice springboard into discussion of key aspects of proposals. When students have completed the quiz and have turned it in, you can go through the answers with them as a group.

2. Apply the proposal checklists. A good classroom exercise is to use the proposal checklist at the end of the chapter to analyze the example proposals shown in the chapter. Students tend not to read the examples carefully and thus miss the extra exposure to the contents, organization, and format of proposals. Also, students tend not to use checklists when they are completing their own drafts and thus fail to include certain key components of proposals. Applying the checklists to the examples in the book may help in both these areas.

3. Group-revise the poorly written proposal. One good possibility for classroom work is to discuss revision of that pathetic proposal toward the end of the chapter. Better still is to get that text typed to disk, wheel a computer and projector into your classroom, and have students tell you how to edit the actual file.

4. Show-and-tell proposals. Have students find and bring in proposals to present to the class. This may be difficult, however, because proposals are generally unpublished and proprietary. Still, if you are just starting out as a technical writing teacher, this is a good way for you to build your own files of examples of proposals.

5. Brainstorm proposal projects. To ensure that students understand how the term is used in Reporting Technical Information, conduct a brainstorming session in which you toss out topics and students work them into proposals. This will necessitate narrowing, analyzing audience and situation, as well as conceptualizing a topic as the focus of a proposal. Keep in mind that some of your students will have trouble distinguishing proposals from feasibility and other sorts of reports.

6. Unscramble scrambled proposal text. Another classroom possibility is to take the text of a good proposal, scramble the sections moderately, and then retype that text as one huge paragraph without any formatting. Get the class discuss how to rearrange the text and format it. Have some fun with this—get students to bring scissors and tape to class. Or you can wheel in a computer and projector to your classroom, and have students tell you how to edit the scrambled text.

7. Group-brainstorm a hypothetical proposal. Another classroom possibility is to plan a hypothetical proposal together as a class. Consider starting with a totally un-narrowed topic (for example, solar energy). Get students to make up an RFP. Have them brainstorm details for each of the main sections of the typical proposal. This is nice practice for the mental gymnastics they will have to perform in planning their own proposals.

Here are some discussion questions related to this chapter:

• In what ways is a proposal a problem-solving mechanism?
• How can an author make the proposed solution attractive and credible to a reader?
• How can an author best present and justify costs? How can an author research and bid an appropriate amount to cover services?

The following links show you some examples of the kinds of writing discussed in this chapter. These examples are "annotated": explanatory notes are linked to specific points in the examples so that you can see the relation to the concepts discussed in the chapter. You'll need a browser that supports frames, however.

1. Proposal: Co-Op Orientation Guide

The following are some suggestions for journal entries related to this chapter:

• What kinds of subjects could you consider developing as proposals? What would be the most difficult part of the research? The composing? Why?
• How can factual presentation make a proposal professionally persuasive?
• How important is price (the bottom line) in supporting a proposal? What other elements matter?

The following are topic ideas related to this chapter. Remember that for most of these ideas, you'll need to do some substantial narrowing before the topic will be usable:

• Propose a new advising procedure for returning students in your major.
• Propose a painting contract for an apartment complex which needs to have interiors repainted.
• Propose a summer research internship you'd like to hold for a professor in your major.

You can structure the proposal assignment a number of ways, depending on your sense of students' level of ability and your own preferences. Here are some ideas, including ones for collaborative projects:

1. Academic proposal for the technical-report project. A simple way to get students to write a proposal is to have them write one on their plans for their final report. In such a proposal, students try to convince you, the instructor, that they can do a good job of that proposed report. Your criteria can include whether they have:
   • a sufficiently narrowed topic
   • a clearly defined audience (which has a nonspecialist element to it)
   • a reasonably detailed outline (at least, for this stage)
   • confidence that adequate information sources exist for their project
   • adequate technical knowledge for the project (or else they are committed to researching it)

   Students should write this document in memo format with headings similar to examples shown in the proposals chapter. See Research Report Proposal, Sample Assignment 1, in the following pages, for a full example of this assignment.

2. Professional proposal for a technical-report project. Considerably more demanding is to have students plan a report project for a real or realistic audience and then write a proposal to that audience to get approval for the project. This requires some mental gymnastics; some students have trouble getting the idea. For these latter, be prepared to act as a brainstorming machine to help them work up a proposal idea that embraces their report project in a realistic manner. Consider having a group-brainstorming session in class. Also, consider having students write the request for proposals for their projects. A realistic RFP establishes a strong context.

   One of the problems with this idea is the conflict that ensues between your needs as an instructor who wants to assess your students' report project and the realistic contents of a proposal. You need to know about the report audience, but if that audience is the same audience of the proposal, it makes little sense to describe the audience in the proposal. Solve this problem by asking students to attach a memo to you the instructor in which they provide any information (such audience description or report type) that does not realistically fit in the proposal itself.

3. Nonreport-based proposal. One other option for the proposal is simply to remove the linkage to the final report altogether. Students can find or make up a request for proposals and then write a proposal that seeks to get approval to do the requested work.

4. Oral presentation of proposal. If you are worried that your students have too many writing projects, you might have them do the proposal as an oral presentation. (See the oral exercises at the end of the textbook chapter.) Doing so will force students to work on their report projects earlier in the semester, and it will enable your students to find others working on the same topics. Hearing what everybody else is working tends to energize the class and increase the enthusiasm level.

5. Revision of a rough-draft proposal. One of the exercises at the end of chapter 16 involves revising the poorly written proposal contained within that chapter. If you prefer to deemphasize the proposal in your course, this might be a good way to provide just enough exposure to the proposal without having students write one themselves.

The following point summaries focus on key points in this chapter of Houp/Pearsall/Tebeaux's Reporting Technical Information:

Sample Assignments

The following provides ideas for writing assignments related to this chapter of Houp/Pearsall/Tebeaux's Reporting Technical Information:

Chapter Objectives — Progress Reports

• Understand the functions and varieties of progress reports used in the professional world.

• Know the logic of the contents and organization of progress reports.

• Know the formatting and style options for progress reports.

• Assess the status of an ongoing project and report that status in a professional manner.

• Produce professional-looking progress reports.

The progress report is a natural follow-on to the proposal. Tell your students that now that they have "that big contract" and are "raking in the big bucks," they need to write periodic progress reports.

Some of your students may need help understanding the point of the progress report. Once they get a good look at what it entails, some will object that they will be wasting the time that they could be using on the research report itself. From their point of view, they will be spending as much time on the progress report as the research report itself.

Complaints about progress reports and status reports are not unique to technical writing students. Many professionals complain about the progress reports as well as the weekly, monthly, or quarterly status reports they must write. Students may need to be convinced of the value of these types of reports, which is discussed in the textbook. One of the central themes is professionalism—which underlies much of what we do in a technical writing course.

Here are some ideas for things you can do in class to help students learn about progress reports and get ready to write their own:

1. Give the chapter quiz. Give the quiz on progress reports at the beginning of the unit. It's a good way to get discussion going on key aspects of this type of report. When students have completed the quiz, you can go through the answers with the whole class.

2. Review the basic concepts. Use the chapter outline and point summaries to review the basic concepts of the progress-report section of the chapter.

3. Apply the progress-report checklists. A good classroom exercise is to use the progress-report checklist at the end of the chapter to analyze the example progress reports shown in the chapter. Students tend not to study the examples carefully and thus miss that additional exposure to the details of the contents, organization, and format of progress reports. Also, students tend not to use the checklists when they are completing their own drafts and thus fail to include certain key components of progress reports. Applying the checklists to the examples in the book may help in both these areas.

4. Unscramble scrambled progress-report text. Another classroom possibility is to take the text of a good progress report, scramble the sections moderately, and then retype that text as one huge paragraph without any formatting. Have the class discuss how to rearrange the text and format it. Get students to bring scissors and tape to class, and have a cut-and-paste party. Or you can bring a computer and projector into your classroom, and have students tell you how to edit the scrambled text.

Here are some discussion questions related to this chapter:

• In what ways is a progress report a responsible follow-up to a proposal? How do they differ?
• Is a progress report a persuasive document? In what ways? What does the author hope to show about his or her professionalism?
• In what ways can document design make progress reports more usable to readers?

Style & Tone of Proposals and Progress Reports (pages 562-570)

• In what way are the style, tone, design, and appearance of proposals and progress reports persuasive elements?

The following links show you some examples of the kinds of writing discussed in this chapter. These examples are "annotated": explanatory notes are linked to specific points in the examples so that you can see the relation to the concepts discussed in the chapter. You'll need a browser that supports frames, however.

1. Progress Report: Investor Guide

The following are some suggestions for journal entries related to this chapter:

• How much do you feel that progress reports depend on proposals? In tone? Order? Content?
• Consider the progress report on pages 542-546. What is the effect of style, organization, design, graphics, and references?
• If the report on pages 542-546 is persuasive, what is it trying to show? Why and how? Is it effective?

The following are topic ideas related to this chapter. Remember that for most of these ideas, you'll need to do some substantial narrowing before the topic will be usable:

• Write a progress report which reports work on the apartment painting job midway through your work on it.
• Write a progress report to the professor at the midway point of the summer internship.
• Write a progress report to a professor on your work on a major semester project four weeks in advance of the due date.

You can structure the progress-report assignment a number of ways, depending on your sense of your students' level of ability and your own preferences. Here are some ideas for progress reports, including ideas for collaborative projects.

1. Progress report on the semester research report. The common way of getting students to write a progress report is to have them report on the status of their semester research report. You can build in some additional incentive for students to make real progress on their semester reports by making evidence of such progress a part of their grade on this writing assignment.

2. Oral-report version of the progress report. Another possibility is to use the progress report as an opportunity for students to give their oral report (which is a requirement in many technical writing courses). The criteria for the progress report are the same; it's just presented orally.

3. Nonreport-based progress reports. It's hard to find contexts for progress reports that are not based on students' research reports. What other long projects are they involved in or could they get involved in? Some students may be working on a semester-long design project or experiment; this might work for the progress report. Some teachers have students write on the progress they've made toward their degrees and address their progress reports to their parents or to their student-loan officers.

   To turn this into a collaborative project, suggest that student teams organize themselves into these roles:

   • Manager. Assigns roles, calls meetings, sets a timeline for activities.
     
   • Team members. Each prepares a summary of his or her completed activities, highlighting problem areas and work to be completed.
     
   • Moderator. Conducts the meeting to discuss and comment on the findings of each team member, organize the data, and to analyze the findings.
     
   • Scribe. Takes notes of the meeting.
     
   • Editor. Drafts the report summarizing the group's progress, changes from original proposed plan, and work to be accomplished; revises it to incorporate group suggestions.

4. Volunteer progress reports. It may be risky, but another possibility is to have students go out in the community and interview someone involved in a project, for example, a construction project or a lengthy study commissioned by city or county government. Students can then write up this information as a progress report.

The following point summaries focus on key points in this chapter of Houp/Pearsall/Tebeaux's Reporting Technical Information:

Sample Assignments

The following provides ideas for writing assignments related to this chapter of Houp/Pearsall/Tebeaux's Reporting Technical Information: