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.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>