After a wicked weekend of work, I've managed to get back to this blog. I'd like to remind all of you who have not confirmed your subscription to my blog to please do so as soon as possible via the confirmation e-mail that you received when you subscribed. Otherwise, your name may be automatically deleted from the subscriber list.
I spent much of the weekend working on the draft proposal from my international client. Most of my work consisted of reorganizing, rewriting, editing, and providing comments. I also wrote some smaller subsections. In addition to all this, I reformatted the individual sections which will eventually be combined into one document. All of these sections were written by different people, with no consistent formatting style.
A lot of the time spent on reformatting can be avoided if the Proposal Manager or other individual prepares and hands out a style sheet to everyone who will be doing any writing. This is not difficult or time-consuming to do. The style sheet should contain at least the following information:
These are the basics. You can also get fancier by specifying styles, shapes, fonts, sizes, etc., for such things as tables, charts, text boxes, headers, and footers. But keep in mind that the writers may not know how or may not take the time to do more advanced types of formatting.
If you are stuck with the task of reformatting a large proposal that is written using MS Word, it will behoove you to learn how to set up and work with styles for each element. If you don't know how to use the styles feature of Word, check out Word's Help thingy or look for information on styles on Microsoft's Word website. Using the styles feature even for basic formatting elements such as headings and body text will considerably lessen reformatting time.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Leave a comment