Finally! Your proposal is nearing its final draft. It’s now time to pay attention to a final detail - punctuation and page layout. Both of these give important cues to the reader, and those cues will help guide the reader smoothly through the proposal.
First and foremost: do not be afraid of paragraphs. A paragraph contains a single idea, and is usually limited to three to five sentences. A page-long unbroken paragraph will probably lose the reader.
Double space between paragraphs, unless the format does not allow it.
Look for run-on sentences with a lot of commas. You can probably break long sentences into several shorter ones by replacing some of the commas with periods.
If your paragraph contains several items or program components, use bullet points to list them. The formatting then gives a cue to the reader that these points are related. The same list with commas or semicolons will not be as easy on the eye.
Be careful in your use of commas, semicolons and colons—they have different purposes and give different cues. If you are rusty on the subject, do a little research. The same is true for hyphens and dashes.
Except in headings or subheadings, avoid CAPITALS, bold face, underlined italics, and exclamation points!!!!! Use only one font. All that drama is a distraction. Remember, this is a business document, not an advertisement.
And finally: one of the most common mistakes is misusing “it’s” and “its”. “Its” is possessive. “It’s” means “It is”. This may seem like a small thing, but small mistakes can make your document look careless.
The good news? Spell check and grammar check will do most of this for you, but they are not infallible. Absolutely make use of them, but then have a real person do the final review.
Susan Chandler is an independent consultant to nonprofit organizations.
