Engineering Proposals: Discourse and Information Structure

Abstract

Proposal writing came to prominence in the late twentieth-century as a significant revenue-raising activity across most sectors: commercial, academic, and charity. Myers describes proposals as being from a practical standpoint ‘the most basic form of scientific writing’ (1990: 41) in his discussion of research biologists. However, whatever the domain, proposal writers rarely find proposals easy to write and it is rare that they are happy with what they produce. Engineers are no different. They and their managers are generally dissatisfied with the proposals they write and ask to be provided with proposal writing models, guidelines, and books that will tell them how to write them.