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Internal Proposals (Make Certain They’re Not Reports) 269

done so. For example, suppose that you work in my firm and our organizational
structure is less effective than you believe it could be. In your spare time, you’ve
been thinking about this problem off and on for months—as you daydream at
work, when you shower at home, and so on. And over these months, you’ve doo-
dled several possible organizational structures, one of which you believe is better
than the current one. You decide to write a document to me that “proposes” the
new structure.
I didn’t tell you to do your little study; no one did. And you really didn’t tell
yourself to do it, either. You “studied” our current organizational structure by
having lived within it. You observed it and analyzed your observations, and you
did so probably without realizing that you had. But clearly, you have answered a
question: “How can my company more effectively organize itself to achieve our
various goals?” If that is also my question and you can support your answer logi-
cally and persuasively, you have a good chance of convincing me of your report’s
recommended solution. But you’ll be less successful if you try to write a proposal.
To take just one example, you’ll spend much time trying to figure out how to
construct a methodology that will answer the overriding question you’ve already
answered.
In summary, then, reports and proposals are different because they serve dif-
ferent purposes, but they are also similar enough that people sometimes request
one when they really want the other, and writers sometimes try to write one when
they ought to be composing the other.
Now that we understand how reports differ from proposals, you probably want
to know how to write them better. Unfortunately, that would require another
book, something like Writing Winning Business Reports. I don’t have time to write
that book right now. But I can offer you some tips that build on the concepts I’ve
already presented to help you logically structure proposals.

Organizing the Body of Your Report:

The Single Recommendation

You already know the best tool you can use to organize your report: a logic tree. As
we discussed in Chapter 5, a “how” logic tree can be used to organize the actions
in your proposal’s methodology. As we discussed in Chapter 11, a “why” logic
tree can organize a qualifications section. Reports use both kinds of logic trees.
Whereas logic trees can be helpful in organizing a proposal’s entire qualifications
section or a part of the methodology, a single logic tree can help you structure the
entire body of a report. The examples in this appendix all use “why” logic trees.
Be aware, however, that although most recommendation or final reports support