Writing with Confidence that’s Contagious to Your Reader

How confident should mission-based writing be? You need to make your reader feel confident in your work and in you, even when you may be writing about things you are unsure of, like what you can do with funding you’re not at all sure you will be awarded. How do you balance your fear of over-promising with the need to promise enough to entice participation and support? Does it sound like vain assumption to write like you are sure your work will be funded, or does it sound insecure to write like you’re not sure? If you come off either too insecure or too vain, then no matter how well you demonstrate the merits of your work, you will turn people off and won’t be successful.

Let’s start by thinking about what it looks like to write too humbly. How many words or phrases do you see in the example below that express uncertainty?

Birch Park is just a small wildlife refuge with a few educational programs, but we believe that if you decide to fund us, we should be able to maintain our paths and clean up litter every week or so. We will also try to start keeping records of some of the species in the park, so that we might be able to tell if their populations decline, and then see if we can help them.

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