Persuasion In Technical Communication: Applying Constructivism To Proposal Writing  

Constructivism is a cognitive theory stating that people construct understanding based on what they already know or understand and that more cognitively complex people can better take and understand others’ perspectives and hence, design more persuasive messages. As the key to proposal writing is persuasion, and the key to persuasion is understanding, applying this theory provides us a general strategy for all proposal writing: first, collect information to establish our own context-related constructs and interpretive schemes and to understand those of our reader; then, make all the writing decisions based on the understanding achieved.

Xu, Jing. STC Proceedings (1994). Careers>Business Communication>Proposals>Persuasive Design