Persuasive Business Proposals: Writing to Win More Customers, Clients, and Contracts

Cognitive Webbing

After witnessing people struggle to present their thoughts in clearly written form, I finally figured out a way to help right-brain people get their ideas onto the page quickly. I call it “cognitive webbing.” It’s a nonlinear process of capturing what you know, what you believe, key points you want to emphasize, examples and illustrations you want to include, so that you have a writing plan.

Cognitive webbing is different from another process often used to develop proposals, called storyboarding. Storyboarding is a technique borrowed from the film industry, in which each scene in a movie is represented by an image with the key points of action or dialogue noted below the image. Directors use storyboards to lay out a film (or ...