Cutting a 472-word proposal down to 400 without losing the argument

The governing question: the Principal is making a funding decision, so every paragraph must answer one of four questions - why this, why now, what does it cost, how will I know it worked. Anything that answers none of them is the first to go.

What goes: Section 1 from 98 words to about 22. Provenance is not a decision criterion, but one clause of precedent is cheap credibility: 'A comparable scheme at my previous school ran for two years with 80% attendance.' That single sentence buys the reassurance without the narrative. Section 4 from 108 to about 85 words.

What must survive, with numbers intact: the 24 students below 40%, the 12 volunteers, the Thursday 20-minute slot, the three success measures, and the HK$6,000 broken into what it buys (books and one training afternoon). These are the parts the Principal will be asked about later.

Order: need and data → design → success measures → cost and request. That sequence mirrors how the decision will actually be made. Ending on the request, rather than on thanks, keeps the ask in the reader's mind; the thanks become two sentences, not a section.

Working budget: 472 − 76 (Section 1) − 23 (Section 4) = 373 words. That leaves roughly 25 words of slack to absorb the contingency sentence, and lands inside the 350-400 range rather than exactly at 400.

Sentence 1, original: 'Having reviewed the data, the need for early intervention is obvious.'

Two faults. The participle 'having reviewed' has no subject it can attach to - the need did not review the data. And 'obvious' asserts a conclusion instead of showing the evidence that produced it.

Rewrite: 'The October reading test shows that 24 S2 students are reading well below their year group; early intervention is therefore the panel's priority for the spring term.'

Sentence 2, original: 'Kids who read with older students get a lot out of it.'

'Kids' is the wrong distance for a proposal to a Principal, but the bigger problem is that 'a lot' and 'it' carry no information. Swapping 'kids' for 'students' and leaving the vagueness would fix the register and miss the point.

Rewrite: 'S2 students who read with an older buddy each week gain sustained fluency practice and a reason to finish a book.'

The connecting principle: register is a by-product of precision and audience, not a coat of formality painted on afterwards. In both sentences the reader has to reconstruct who did what and what was actually found. Fix the actor and the evidence, and the appropriate tone follows. Over-formal padding ('the aforementioned intervention') would fail the same test in the opposite direction.

Placement: at the end of Section 3, immediately after the success measures and before the cost paragraph. That is where a reader's risk question naturally arises ('what if it doesn't get off the ground?'), and answering it there stops it becoming an objection that has to be raised back at you.

Draft: 'If fewer than ten volunteers commit by 30 September, each buddy will take two S2 students and the Thursday slot will run in two rooms; the scheme will not start with fewer than eight confirmed volunteers.'

Why this wording:

• It is conditional and specific - a threshold, a date, and the operational change. 'We hope to have enough volunteers' would read as unpreparedness.
• It names the fallback, not just the risk. The Principal can see the scheme still functions at reduced scale.
• It states a floor. Naming a stopping point is what makes the rest of the proposal credible; a writer who cannot imagine failure is usually hiding it.

What to avoid: apologetic framing ('unfortunately we cannot guarantee …') and vague mitigation ('we will try our best to recruit more'). Both draw attention to the risk without reducing it. The sentence should cost about 30 words, which the earlier cuts have already paid for.