Bull's Eye Business Writing Tips

Tip # 441:  ...bids/proposals.

These FREE weekly business writing tips
will help you improve your business writing.

Tip #441:  Be prepared to answer customers who ask for bids/proposals.  Write these questions to ask of the prospect:

  1. What’s the scope of the project?
  2. What’s the timeframe for the work to be started and completed?
  3. How soon will you be making a decision on a vendor?
  4. How many bids are you getting?
  5. What other alternatives are you considering?
  6. What are the most important considerations in your decision—price, quality, convenience?

Weekly Exercise:

We receive over 200 emails per day.  We encourage you to answer our weekly tips, but please, if you are answering this weekly tip exercise,  identify the tip number in the subject line of your email.

This week’s quiz:

Be aware that the correct verb and/or pronoun reference to a collective noun may sound funny.  Please revise the following sentences:

  1. The species is becoming extinct.
  2. Greenwater Furniture Company are donating time and money for their favorite causes.
  3. The tribe are moving closer to one another.

Comments: 

Roger Groce  commented:
Thanks for the tip about Thesaurus.com.  It's better than anything I've seen.  I also learned about StyleWriter software from you several years ago and use it almost every day. 

Another thing I use (although I read about it elsewhere) is something called Read Please Natural Voices (http://www.readplease.com/) a text-to-speech converter that lets you hear what you've written --- as spoken by your choice of 4 different voices that sound like people, not computers.  Hearing someone else read your words makes it easier to spot and smooth out the rough spots.  Don't know if any of your readers are that serious about improving their writing, but hearing your own words can magnify errors that spell-checkers don't pick up.

(Read Please was invented by a Canadian software developer whose father's eyesight was failing.  He invented something that would allow his father to continue reading.  A lot of writers have since found it useful as a proofreading tool.)  Thanks for all you do, week in and week out.

Quote of the week:

“A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.”  (Adlai Stevenson II, 20th century American politician)

Suggested Answer to this week's exercise:

  1. The species of ferns is becoming extinct.

  2. The employees of Greenwater Furniture Company are donating time and money for their favorite causes.

  3. The tribe of monkeys are moving closer to one another.

To send the above exercise answers to Gloria for her comments and review,  copy the questions,  paste  them into an email, answer them,  and send to Marsha@basic-learning.com.

 

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10 Easy Guides for Getting to Your Writing Target
By Gloria Pincu, M.A. , President of Basic Learning Systems, Inc.
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Here are some books on business writing that I recommend.

Bull's Eye Business Writing is also available from Amazon.com.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, author, Lynne Truss The Everything Resume Book by Steven Graber
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , by William Knowlton Zinsser  The Gregg Reference Manual, by William A. Sabin 
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, White, E. B. White  How to Take the Fog Out of Business Writing, by Robert Gunning, Richard A. Kallan (Contributor) 

More books on business writing and other business subjects  (available from Amazon.com). 

Contact Gloria Pincu at Basic Learning Systems, Inc.

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