A Meditation on Proposals and Their Backgrounds

Based upon several years of research on proposal writing in large management consulting firms, this article attempts to define the proposal genre and argue the importance of the background section, especially in the management consulting environment. Because the background is the first major section in these proposals, it offers writers the opportunity to demonstrate implicitly their qualifications as problem solvers long before a qualifications section does so explicitly. That demonstration, the projection of image and ethos, can occur logically—through an argument that responds to the generic requirements of proposals, and psychologically—through the incorporation of themes that respond to the rhetorical situation.