Editing a proposal or a bid

What does a solicitation tell us about how the proposal will be read?

More than most first-time bidders expect. Under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, a request for proposals in a competitive acquisition has to describe four things at minimum. The first two are the government's requirement and the anticipated terms and conditions of the contract. The other two are the information required to be in the offeror's proposal, and the factors and significant subfactors that will be used to evaluate it, together with their relative importance.¹

Two of those four have their own lettered sections in the uniform contract format. Section L carries the "solicitation provisions and other information and instructions not required elsewhere to guide offerors or respondents in preparing proposals."² Section M is where the contracting officer must "identify all significant factors and any significant subfactors that will be considered in awarding the contract and their relative importance."²

Reading those two sections against each other before drafting tends to reshape the outline. Section L governs the form of the submission, and Section M governs what will be looked for once it arrives.

Why would an editor start with Section M rather than the draft?

The regulation restricts the evaluators to it. Proposals are assessed "solely on the factors and subfactors specified in the solicitation."³ A paragraph that answers a question Section M does not ask has no place to score, however well it is written.

The same section requires that the relative strengths, deficiencies, significant weaknesses, and risks supporting the evaluation be documented in the contract file.³ Someone is writing down what they found and did not find.

The editorial work that follows is unglamorous and effective. Each factor and subfactor gets a findable answer, in the solicitation's own vocabulary rather than the company's internal vocabulary, in the order the solicitation used. Where a term is renamed halfway through a volume, a reader looking for the first name may conclude the answer is missing.

What level of edit does a proposal need?

Rarely a developmental one, since the technical approach is set by the people who will perform the work. The pass that helps most is a substantive and copy edit combined, run late enough that the content is stable and early enough that changes can still be made.

Volumes assembled from several contributors show the seams. Capitalization of the program name varies, acronyms are expanded twice or never, the same subcontractor appears under two forms of its name, and cross-references point at section numbers that moved.

Where a page or word limit applies, the tightening is part of the same pass. Cutting to a limit while preserving the sentences that answer an evaluation factor is a different job from cutting for elegance, and it goes better when the person cutting has the factor list beside them.

What does an editor need from your side before starting?

The solicitation and every amendment to it, since amendments frequently change Section L or Section M. A compliance matrix if one exists, or the outline that stands in for it. The approved corporate language that cannot be altered, marked as such. Finally, the name of the one person whose wording decision is final.

Past performance write-ups and resumes often carry text cleared elsewhere. Knowing which passages are cleared prevents an editor from improving a sentence someone else has already signed off, which would send it back for clearance.

The submission format matters as much as the content. A volume that has to be delivered as a single PDF under a file size limit constrains what can be done with graphics, and knowing that before the edit prevents a late round of cuts.

Where the bid is a teaming arrangement, the partner's material is usually the least consistent part of the package. Sending it at the same time as your own draft is better than sending it three days before the deadline.

Does the deadline really work the way people say it does?

The provision governing it is specific. A proposal received after the exact time specified is late and will not be considered, and the exception has several parts. It has to be received before award is made, and the contracting officer has to determine that accepting it would not unduly delay the acquisition. One of three stated conditions then has to apply.⁴

The first of those conditions covers electronic transmission received at the initial government entry point no later than 5:00 p.m. one working day before proposals were due.⁴ Two further points change how a schedule should be built. Offerors "may submit revised proposals only if requested or allowed by the Contracting Officer," and the standard provision states that the government "intends to evaluate proposals and award a contract without discussions with offerors."⁴

A first submission is therefore often the only submission. Scheduling the edit to finish a day or two before the deadline, rather than against it, is the practical consequence.

Is the price fixed, or an estimate that can move?

EditFast quotes on the document. Editing is priced at about four cents a word in US dollars, so a quote follows from a word count rather than from an impression of difficulty.

Proposals move while they are being edited, which is the usual reason a figure changes. A volume that grows by nine thousand words after the quote is a larger job than the one quoted. Where the schedule is compressed and the file arrives in pieces, we say so before starting rather than afterward.

The cheapest arrangement for a bidder is usually a single stable draft. Editing the same section three times as it changes costs three times as much as editing it once, and it produces a worse result, because each pass sees less of the whole.

Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, which includes solicitations under a nondisclosure agreement and the teaming arrangements described inside them.

Who has the final say on a disputed change?

You do. An editor's changes arrive as tracked changes and comments, and a proposal manager accepts, rejects, or overrules any of them without giving a reason.

Disputes on bids usually concern technical vocabulary rather than grammar. Where a term reads oddly to a general reader but is the term of art the evaluators use, the term of art wins. A query in the margin is the right way to establish which of the two cases applies, since only the bid team knows.

The one thing worth settling early is who arbitrates between contributors. A technical lead and a capture manager can disagree about a sentence, and an editor cannot resolve that for them. Naming the arbitrator in advance costs a minute and saves a day near the deadline.

Can an editor make a proposal win?

Nobody can promise that, and an editor who does is selling something other than editing. Award turns on price, technical approach, past performance, and the judgment of an evaluation panel. None of those four are ours to influence, and no amount of polish substitutes for a weak technical approach or a price that misses the range.

What editing changes is whether the proposal is easy to score. An evaluator working through a factor list should find each answer where the solicitation implied it would be, in the words the solicitation used, with the numbers matching across volumes.

A proposal that is hard to follow is being marked by someone with a stack of others to read. Consistency, findability, and plain sentences are the part of the problem editing reaches, and they are the only part we claim.