Suggests five ways to make college proposal-writing assignments correspond more closely to the proposal-writing situations faced by engineers. They include emphasizing sales proposals over in-house planning or research and development proposals, using actual or fictional cases as the basis for assignments, and requiring oral presentations of the…

Describes how a request for proposals (RFP)--a solicitation of offers to perform a job or service--can be an effective tool to teach proposal writing to technical writing students. (MM)

Advances the idea that storyboarding, long associated with scriptwriting, advertising, and more recently with technical manuals, can be successfully applied to an even broader variety of technical documents. Applies storyboarding techniques to designing technical proposals to suggest methods of incorporating more visuals into documents, as well as…

Discusses a proposal writing project in a technical writing course, in which students develop and actually submit a proposal for possible implementation. (GW)

Reviews reasons for teaching the writing of proposals for grants. (CH)

Suggests that proposal writing can benefit technical writing students by enhancing skills in using persuasion devices with technology. Presents three rhetorical structural steps (beginning, middle, and end) that reinforce a proposal writing exercise suitable for both university and business applications. (HTH)

As more psychologists become involved in program evaluation, program evaluation courses have been developed by many psychology departments. Psychology graduate students (N=19) participated in a semester-long simulation course. Students divided into small groups, and each group submitted a written proposal for evaluating the counseling service of a…

This paper discusses the teaching approaches used in a basic composition course designed for educationally disadvantaged students. The course integrates three approaches: mastery teaching and learning; James Moffett's student-centered naturalistic curriculum; and Ken Macrorie's Third Way, which combines freedom and discipline in a writing…

Technical communications courses, which frequently present the research proposal as part of the report writing segment, rarely teach the grant proposal, even though it can provide the instructor with a vehicle for presenting such rhetorical strategies as audience analysis and persuasive writing. In addition to its problem solving structure, the…

The justification for including a year-long course in practical writing and editing in a research-oriented university's writing program and a description of that course are presented in this paper. Discussed are the responses to four questions: What is practical or survival writing? How much is there of it? What can a university gain from teaching…