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Researching proposal development: accounting for the complexity of designing persuasive texts

Published: 18 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Formal accounts of how proposals are prepared in the contemporary workplace are scarce. In particular, researchers have published very few reports based on structured studies of proposal writing. This paper offers an overview of the current state of our knowledge about proposal writing in the contemporary workplace. Drawing upon data from a case study, the paper then advances an argument for the field to develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of proposal development as a complex information gathering and design activity

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGDOC '06: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
    October 2006
    224 pages
    ISBN:1595935231
    DOI:10.1145/1166324
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 18 October 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. communicative event models
    2. genre ecologies
    3. information design
    4. proposals

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    • (2025)How Do Nonprofit Proposal Writers Learn Their Jobs? Results of a Nationwide Survey and InterviewsJournal of Business and Technical Communication10.1177/10506519241307786Online publication date: 9-Jan-2025
    • (2015)Identifying latent variables in nonprofit proposal writingProceedings of the 33rd Annual International Conference on the Design of Communication10.1145/2775441.2775468(1-7)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2015
    • (2015)How do entrepreneurs hone their pitches?Proceedings of the 33rd Annual International Conference on the Design of Communication10.1145/2775441.2775455(1-11)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2015
    • (2015)Remaking the Pitch: Reuse Strategies in Entrepreneurs’ Pitch DecksIEEE Transactions on Professional Communication10.1109/TPC.2015.241527758:1(45-68)Online publication date: Mar-2015
    • (2014)Identifying how U.S. nonprofit organizations operate within the Information Process Maturity ModelProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on The Design of Communication CD-ROM10.1145/2666216.2666220(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2014
    • (2014)Making the Pitch: Examining Dialogue and Revisions in Entrepreneurs' Pitch DecksIEEE Transactions on Professional Communication10.1109/TPC.2014.234235457:3(158-181)Online publication date: Sep-2014
    • (2012)Activity streamsProceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication10.1145/2379057.2379109(279-288)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2012
    • (2011)Opportunities for proactive support of reuse and organizational learning in ad hoc collaborative work activity: A field study of proposal writing2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS)10.1109/CTS.2011.5928676(143-150)Online publication date: May-2011
    • (2009)Systems of Classification and the Cognitive Properties of Grant Proposal Formal DocumentsTechnical Communication Quarterly10.1080/1057225090314968818:4(303-326)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2009
    • (2007)Narrative-based writing for coherent technical documentsProceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication10.1145/1297144.1297190(208-215)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2007
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