Tender Writing Advice

Tender writing is a complex activity with lots of different elements to manage. However, tender writing and tender management is a process. This is part two of a series of five blogs to do with tender management. Remember tender management and tender writing is a process. You can write and manage a tender by following a process and using common sense. This second blog on tender writing looks at the main elements to consider when designing and formatting your tender. Design and formatting has been divided into two parts.
Some of this may sound a little obvious but you would be amazed at how many tenders I have see that do not follow these pretty basic rules.

Fonts for your tender

I have seen a variety of different fonts used for tender writing and there are a good many that work and work well. I always like to write my tenders in either 10,11 or 12 point Ariel with 12 being far my most popular. I like the tender to look balanced on the page and it needs to be easily read when it it is printed off. Of course in some tenders the font is specified but where it is not you should consider how it is going to look on the page and how the font of your tender is going to match with the headings of your tender. They should balance and complement one another and not jar. I have seen many a tender with great font to be spoilt by inappropriate headings and vice versa.
When you select the heading styles for your tender writing just make sure that it looks natural and that both the font and the sub headings match.

My personal pet hate is over use of bold. Use bold in your tender writing sparingly or not at all and I believe it will look much better., or not at all.

Using italic text in your tender is often a useful way of bringing the readers attention to an important part within your tender. The problem is the text can suffer on low-resolution monitors because of the slanted and more curved shapes of italicized letters. These are likely to look too pixilated when aliased, and too blurred when anti-aliased, and will spoil legibility when used in lengthy body text. However, this should not stop you from using an italic face when convention approves it, for example, quoting foreign words and phrases, or listing books and periodical titles.

Tender writers should always be careful when underline body text in an electronic tender submission .It's commonly understood that underlining text on the Web is not a good idea. Conventions tell us that any underlined text is a link, and can be clicked on. It's a pretty fair bet that if you go around underlining text that's not clickable, witin your tender or you over use it you are going to confuse some readers. We have grown so accustomed to hyperlinks it is almost second nature. Other than some headings I tend not to underline words in a tender.

Writing a tender using colour for emphasis can be problematic. Like underlined words, coloured words could be mistaken for a link within body text. I usually keep coloured text out of my tender.
Capital letters are something that are often overused by some tender writers. A good tender writer should know that, rather like bold, capital letters should not be used too much in tenders.

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