ecognized and stated by the reader, by the writer, or both. This gives us the foundations for a typology of proposals. Not all proposals, but most of them fall into the following six categories:

       • applications for government grants,

       • bids for government contracts,

       • applications for foundation grants,

       • applications for corporate grants,

       • bids for commercial contracts,

       • internal proposals (where writer and reader are members of the same organization). (Haselkorn 1985)

       Proposals are often written according to requirements set in Requests for Proposals (RFPs).

       Proposals are delivered to a specific audience to achieve a specific purpose. The audience of a proposal may include both technical and non-technical readers. Both groups have to be addressed. One part of the audience may be interested in the results, other part in the costs; again others in trying out new things. Some may resist new ideas. he following questions have to be answered concerning the audience of a proposal:

       • Who is the real audience?

       • What does the reader already know?

       • What does the reader want to know?

       • What does the reader not want to know?

       • What does the reader perceive?

       The person (or persons) who can make a decision or take action as a result of the proposal constitutes the real audience. In many cases there are many readers of a proposal. The first reader may have the authority to reject the idea but not the authority to approve it. A proposal may be evaluated by a team selected for that purpose. A good proposal should include information necessary to have each person who receives it take the appropriate action, as well as information required to ensure that the right person sees it. From this perspective, the audience can be divided into three distinct categories:

       • Primary audience: The person or persons who can make decisions or act on the proposal.

       • Secondary audience: Those who will be affected by the decision or action taken.

       • Intermediate audience: Those who review and route the proposal.

       Individual readers often tend to focus on their own areas of interest and specialization. Some of them focus on technical details; others on budgetary and financial matters; and those who work in personnel may focus primarily on the way people will be influenced. (Bowman & Branchaw 1992).

       A linguistic analysis of research grant proposals submitted to the European Union (Connor & Mauranen 1999) showed, that following the model for article introductions proposed by Swales (1990) ten rhetorical moves can be identified. Of these moves the following nine occur in the majority of proposals:

       • Establishing Territory

       • Gap

       • Goal

       • Means

       • Reporting Previous Research

       • Achievements

       • Benefits

       • Competence Claim

       • Importance Claim

       The first move in most proposals examined was one which established the territory in which the research placed itself. They found that it is possible to distinguish two types of territory, of which at least one, but sometimes both were used:

       • a 'real-world' territory, i.e. how the proposed project is situated in the world outside the research field;

       • a research territory, that is, the fiel

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