The Critical Proposal

The Function of Criticism paper asks you to provide a general defense of literary scholarship in the present age. The Critical Proposal is providing you with the opportunity to make a particular case, tailored to your strengths as a reader and writer.

In the second half of the semester, after you have turned in your Professional Portfolio, you will be required to produce an unsolicited business proposal that “sells” your professional expertise to a potential client.

Like Just the Minutes, this exercise will be a creative application of professional writing skills in the confines of the academic classroom, but it will have a real world application. The business identified in your proposal (a business that may be a non-profit, governmental agency, charter school, or quasi-governmental agency, such as a public university) must be real. Ideally, it should be the business/organization identified in the cover letter in your Professional Portfolio.

This task, though, is distinct in form and content from a cover letter. Here you will not be trying to convince a potential employer you are the right fit for an advertised job; you will be identifying a need the business/organization may not even know it has, and showing that business/organization how you (and you alone) can address the need. Because your proposal will be unsolicited, you will need to make a strong visual and verbal case to your potential client.

The critical angle in this assignment is your ability to sell your chosen business/organization a specialized service that is necessarily allied with your disciplinary strengths. Every Executive Summary, Statement of Need, and Proposed Solution should demonstrate the application of skills derived from an English degree. Every Qualifications section should include an implied “defense of the discipline.”

Worried about the defense of the discipline? Don’t be! We’ll be discussing the importance of our degree all semester long. This proposal will provide a practical application for the “function of criticism” we articulated at the start!

The form we’ll follow in our proposals:

1. Title page
2. Table of contents
3. Executive summary (the general overview of the proposal itself–often articulated as the “why”–this should encapsulate the entire project)
4. Statement of need (here you may identify a particular problem that needs to be solved or just note a general absence of some important element–what’s important is that you establish the need for your services)
5. Proposed solution (the positive results of your professional intervention–remember, even if you don’t identify a particular problem, you will still be providing some form of remediation or improvement than can be considered a solution)
6. Qualifications (what makes you the best person for the task–note, this portion should have some overlap with the cover letter in the Professional Portfolio–it should also provide an implicit defense of your English degree)
7. Timeline (how long the project or work will take from start to finish)
8. Pricing and billing options (here you can default back to “cover letter mode” and loosely define “billing” your “client”–creative writers proposing a book can outline royalty expectations; job applicants can use this as an opportunity to outline salary expectations; and those who might be focused on non-profit work could discuss volunteer or internship experience)
9. Terms and conditions (the section where you carefully outline what can and should be reasonably expected of you and your work–and what you can expect in return)

(You may need to download the proposal to view the annotations in the pdf)