Enthusiasm in technical proposals: verifying a method of lexical analysis

Author

Beck, Charles E. ; Wegner, Keith A.

Author_Institution

Tech. Commun., Colorado Univ., Denver, CO, USA

Volume

33

Issue

3

fYear

1990

fDate

9/1/1990 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

118

Lastpage

123

Abstract

Analyzing proposals for evidence of enthusiasm verified a method of lexical analysis and substantiated the presence of enthusiasm in social science/humanities proposals but not in science/engineering proposals. Proposal evaluators, both experts and nonexperts, react to technical accuracy as well as subjective elements in the proposal document itself. A study of word usage identified a lexicon that reflected enthusiasm in proposals, then analyzed 1000-word samples of text for the presence of this vocabulary. Testing this method on government requests for proposals (RFPs) and business salesmanship texts determined a range of values for an enthusiasm index (EI). Subsequent analysis of fifteen technical proposals as a group revealed no significant difference between the RFPs and the proposals themselves. However, a breakdown by subject yielded a significant difference between those from social science/humanities and those from science/engineering. The successful proposals contained occurrences of enthusiastic lexicon, but the method only examined this one indicator of enthusiasm

Keywords

computational linguistics; glossaries; RFPs; business salesmanship texts; enthusiasm index; government requests; lexical analysis; science/engineering proposals; social science/humanities proposals; subjective elements; technical accuracy; technical proposals; word usage; Costs; Electric breakdown; Government; Lakes; Professional communication; Proposals; Rhetoric; Testing; Vocabulary; Writing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0361-1434

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/47.59086

Filename

59086