Proposal Essays: Overview
The broad purposes for most academic and real-world proposals are either to offer a solution to a problem or to seek support for a social need. Many topics are suitable for a proposal in a college writing class. For example, some problems and needs are local and can be acted on directly, such as improving access to mental health services on your campus, offering a new food delivery option to campus buildings, designating quiet study spaces in your library, or bringing a farmer’s market to your campus. Others are large-scale, research-oriented proposals such as reducing automobile emissions, providing broadband Internet access nationwide, or reforming immigration policies in the United States. Above all, a proposal must address a real-life problem or social need, and present one or more workable solutions.
To craft a rhetorically successful Proposal Essay in a college course requires a writer to use many skills. You must identify a problem or a need, an then find an audience who can help make your proposal happen—usually a person or group with enough power to affect the change your proposal requires. Perhaps most importantly, you must think carefully about how to explain the logistics of your proposal, such as materials needed, timeframe, cost-benefit analysis, and more, all of which should usually be supported by research evidence. And then write and revise until you find the right tone and structure that helps you support the merits and feasibility of your proposal.
As part of writing a proposal essay, it’s also important for you to understand rhetoric, fallacies, and different types of argument:
Key Features
Address a Specific Problem or Need
As a writer of a proposal, it’s your responsibility to ensure that you know (and your audience knows) what the problem or need is and why it needs to be addressed. Some problems are well-known, whereas others need to be explained. Don’t assume you already know everything necessary about your proposal’s focus. You may know some things already, but probably not in enough detail to craft an effective proposal to convince an audience. And once you’ve learned more about the topic of your proposal, don’t assume your audience knows as much as you do—remember that it’s your job to explain the specific focus of your proposal. After all, it’s hard to garner support from an audience who doesn’t fully understand the problem or need you’re writing about.
Questions to Help Narrow Your Proposal’s Focus
Here is a list of questions to help clarify and specify the details of your proposal:
- How do I know this is a problem or a need?
- What are a few examples of the problem or need?
- What causes the problem or has led to this need?
- Who is affected by the problem and/or would be aided by filling this need?
- What are some negative effects of the problem and/or that would be addressed by filling this need?
- Why should the problem be solved and/or need be addressed?
- What are the potential consequences if nothing is done to address this problem or fill this need?
- What are some realistic ways to address this problem and/or fill this need?
Your answers to these questions will form the backbone of your proposal as well as help you identify gaps in your knowledge that need to filled through research and further thinking.
Address a Specific Audience
When writing a proposal, identifying the best audience is critical to your success. Let’s say I’m proposing that a city needs to address poor literacy rates among its teen population. My proposed solution is to build a new public library specifically tailored to teenagers and their interests. Who would best be able to help with accomplishing that at a local level? Probably not our country’s president or even a state’s governor—they are usually concerned with matters on a larger scale than one city—but perhaps a city’s mayor or other local representatives might be receptive to my proposal.
This is why choosing the best audience is key to your proposal’s success, because an otherwise good proposal given to the wrong audience probably fails if that audience can’t help enact your proposal.
Similarly, it can be useful to have an idea of what the audience already knows. It is up to you as the writer to learn as much as possible about your audience. You need to know how receptive your audience may be to your suggestions and what they know about the problem or need you’re proposing to solve. Their knowledge—or lack thereof—will require you to adjust your writing as needed. For example, the ways you write and use rhetoric for a city mayor may, and probably should, be very different than if your audience were local school principal.
Questions to Help Think About Your Audience
Here are some questions to help choose the best audience for your proposal:
Who is your audience?
Your reader should be someone with decision-making authority over your problem or need. Theoretically, they could implement any changes you ultimately suggest. They are an action-taker in a corporation, organization, business, government agency, and so on.
What type of audience are they?
Expert, politician, technician, executive, gatekeeper, and so on?
What is your audience’s background and knowledge level of the topic?
What are their needs and interests? What will likely persuade them to support your proposed idea? What do they want? What do they value? And what do they know or need to know about your topic?
A Logical Structure
Unlike some other genres, proposal essays often have a very clear structure that suits their ultimate purpose: convincing an audience to help make your proposal a reality. Because of this, most proposals have a standard structure to ensure that you have covered everything your audience will need to know in order to make a fully informed decision.
Structuring a Proposal Essay
Most proposal essays include the following sections:
Introduction
The introduction of a proposal essay should do at least these three things:
- Define the focus of your proposal.
- State the purpose of your proposal.
- Stress to the audience the importance of implementing your proposal.
Description of the Problem or Need
Often occurring just after the introduction, this section discusses the basics of the problem or need that the proposal is meant to address. So that your audience has enough background info, it can be very helpful to cover the 5 W’s of the problem/need (who, what, where, when, and why).
Explanation of Solution(s)
After describing the problem or need, you will present the solution or solutions you have discovered through your research. If you are proposing more than one solution, present them one at a time.
Logistics of Making Your Proposal Happen
By now, your audience knows about the problem or need, knows about your solution, and wants to more fully understand the details of making your proposal happen.
Some common logistical concerns to consider:
- Methods
- How exactly will your proposal be enacted, and by whom?
- Location
- Where exactly will your proposal happen or be built?
- Schedule
- How long should it take for your proposal to be enacted?
- Costs and Benefits
- How much will your proposal cost, and who will pay those costs?
- What exactly are the benefits of your proposal, and who exactly will experience those benefits?
Conclusion
The final paragraph or section of the proposal should bring your audience’s focus back to the positive aspects of the proposal. In the final section, you can remind them of the proposal’s benefits, and maybe make one last argument for why your proposal is worth investing their time, energy, and finances. This is your proposal’s final punch, so make it count.
Relevant Evidence to Support Proposal
At its most basic level, a proposal is trying to prove something, and most academic writing that tries to prove anything relies on relevant evidence as part of that proof. A proposal essay is no different.
Different parts of a proposal essay have different purposes, but most will benefit from citing sources that might include specific facts, statistics, and examples that demonstrate the rationale and feasibility of your proposal. Your audience will expect you to have done your homework and present trustworthy information about the problem and the solution. If you don’t, your ethos suffers and your proposal’s chance of success diminishes.
As you seek out evidence for your proposal essay, the below chapters will help you navigate the research process:
Develop an Objective Stance and Maintain a Credible Tone
Writing objectively means adopting a position and tone that are neutral and free from bias, personal feelings, and emotional language. You may be passionate about your proposal, and that’s good, but you should ensure that your writing still comes off as unbiased, objective, and professional. In doing so, you show respect for your readers’ knowledge and intelligence, and you build credibility and trust, or ethos, with your readers. And if you present your proposal clearly and with good support, that should be enough to convince an audience to respect your ideas and consider helping out.
Rely on Rhetoric Throughout
In addition to developing your credibility (aka, your ethos), it’s vital that you carefully consider how to use rhetoric at each step as you craft your proposal. Remember that rhetoric is how we persuade others, so well deployed instances of ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos are how you will persuade an audience to help out with your proposal.
Citations
As we write proposal essays, we often rely on evidence found in sources we find during the research process. Therefore, it’s vital that we use a detailed citation process in order to demonstrate to our readers where our supporting evidence comes from and why it’s credible. This process will involve citations at the end of your essay, but also, and just as importantly, in-text citations throughout your essay. Using in-text citations and signal phrases is necessary to successfully guide readers through the information you have collected in your essay. Without in-text citations, readers are completely lost as to where the information came from, why it’s credible, and how it connects to your proposal.
Drafting Checklists
These questions should help guide you through the stages of drafting your argument essay.
Prewriting
- What will you choose as the main focus for your proposal essay?
- What problems or social needs interest you, and how could you turn those interests into a full-fledged proposal supported by research?
- Who is your intended audience?
- In other words, who are you trying to persuade? And why should they care about helping with your proposal?
- What background information about the problem or need might your audience need?
- Are there key terms or concepts you will need to define or describe early in your essay so your audience better understands the bulk of your proposal?
- What kinds of evidence do you need to find?
- Where should you try to find this evidence?
- Why should your audience care about this evidence?
- After you’ve collected some research, which sources are ultimately necessary for your essay?
- Why those sources and not others?
- How will you use those sources in your essay?
- How might you structure your essay?
- What main points might you cover throughout your essay?
- How might your start your essay?
- How might you end your essay?
Writing and Revising
- Is your proposed solution made clear early in your essay?
- Does your opening rhetorically and effectively capture your audience’s interests?
- Have you provided important background and context related to the problem or need you are seeking to address?
- Do you have a clear statement in your introduction of what exactly your proposal is trying to achieve?
- Have you presented this statement in the best possible place?
- Have you effectively structured your essay in a logical way that suits your proposal and its purpose?
- Have you written your essay with a credible tone and objective style?
- Would readers find your tone and style to be professional and authoritative? Or too casual and informal?
- Have you avoided using any slang or other informal language that would detract from your credibility?
- Have you used credible evidence that suits your purpose?
- Have you created correct works cited entries for all your sources?
- Have you used signal phrases and in-text citations to integrate sources into your essay?
- Would readers question the credibility or relevance of any of your sources?
Sources Used to Create this Chapter
Parts of this chapter were remixed from:
- UNM Core Writing OER Collection, edited by Lisa Myers and Lukus Malaney, which was published under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
- Writing in Genres, edited by Stephanie Frame, which was published under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.
