Your experts aren't bad writers. They're experts.

There is a particular request that appears in offices everywhere. "Could you just send us a few paragraphs?"

It sounds harmless. It can be totally benign. It’s right up there with ‘Surely we must have a…’, or It usually isn't.

You have an engineer, researcher, programme manager or technical specialist who has spent years becoming very good at something normal people find difficult. Genuinely, ball-bouncingly tricky. The kind of difficult where the training takes a years and the mistakes take lives, or budgets, or both.

Naturally, the efficient thing to do is ask them to stop doing that and spend 45 minutes staring angrily at a blank Word document. Cursor blinking. Deadline looming. A gnawing sense that few paragraphs is corporatese for ‘We haven't thought about this properly and now it's your problem.’ They will produce something, because they have to. It may be absolutely brilliant. They may get these requests often. As writers, we often pray to deities of our choice that they are only too happy to help, and exhibit the writing skills needed to bring roaring success to their contribution.

Then the text arrives. We’re tactful of course, usually because they are a lot more senior and Directory than we are. They were probably there when George Stevenson came back from an afternoon of darts, pie and brandy with Isambard Kingdom Brunel and invented the thing you’re asking them about; they know it that well. They aren't bad at their jobs. But there is, as ever one small problem.

They can’t write like a writer can write. Or edit like a writer can edit, and that’s fine, because that’s your job. Knowing their shit absolutely backwards and upside-down is their domain. Listening and typing with absurd rapidity is yours.

Nobody hired the expert in for their prose. Nobody sat in that interview panel and said: "Why yes, this seventeen-decade radiation containment strategy is entirely compliant, on budget and deliverable, but while we think the Prefecture will like it, don’t you think it could do with a bit more… pizzazz? Maybe even a cheeky knob-gag?"

The SME is not there to make the bid look cool, or sound achievable, or excite investors. They’re there for credibility, confidence and the heft that makes the bid work in the eyes of the customer.

As proposal writers, we’ve all been there: Early-career writers will send the question, asking the SME to draft something appropriate. They’ll wait, maybe with a coffee. Chase. Wait again. Feel a bit concerned. Then: ping! Just over 1,700 words, from 1994, answering a slightly different question.

If you’re new, you could assume they’re bang-on. They are effectively Gandalf to your Frodo here, after all. Maybe some of this stuff about… hovercraft exhaust manifold design… is pertinent? You can’t shout at them, because they’re basically wizards, so really you’ve only got two options: go for it yourself, or perform a little ‘light tinkering’.

Nurse: the screens

So, given the time constraints handed down by other sections, you decide to perform a little surgery. Late at night, Coffee number 12 going cold, trying to work out whether "robust and future-proofed methodology" means anything at all, or whether it's just what confident people say when they haven't got to the point yet.

Eventually, you realise that there is, and there always has been, a better and easier way. Talk to them. Not "send us your thoughts." Not "just brain-dump it and we'll tidy up." Actually sit down, or dial in, and talk.

Give an experienced proposal writer 20 minutes with somebody who genuinely understands the subject and we can usually get more useful material than three days of email tennis. Three days. Multiple people cc'd. Someone replying "+1" to a question nobody answered. A thread that ends, eventually, in silence, because everyone has quietly decided somebody else will deal with it.

Conversation changes everything.

You can interrupt.

"Hang on. Why?"

Or more likely: “What’s all this stuff about hovercraft in here for?”

Try writing that in an email without sounding like a muppet. You can't, we’ve all tried.

Experts rarely know which parts of their knowledge are valuable to outsiders, because to them, those things stopped being remarkable years ago. The thing that would make a client sit up is, to the expert, Tuesday. They walked past the impressive bit so long ago they've forgotten it's there.

They live inside the subject, but of course, the interviewer - and often the prospect the whole thing is aimed at - doesn't. Not at the level of detail that is required at times. That knowledge gap is useful, as it creates resistance; a reason for a little ‘interview’ to take place in the first place. Despite being hired for our writing capabilities, knowing when to shut up and be told what’s what by someone who really knows is a vital skill in our trade. It is, in fact, the entire point.

The writer does not replace expertise

Those of us whose talents lie in the creation of stories are an essential bridge between the hyper-precise, required expertise only an SME can provide, interested laymen who need to know that something is compliant but not what it’s necessarily for, and of course, the client, or the panel, or the person reading at half past four on a Friday who has 90 seconds and no patience for a methodology paragraph that starts with "in today's ever-evolving landscape."

So the next time somebody says an SME "isn't very good at writing," perhaps stop asking them to be. Let the expert be expert. That is, after all, what you're paying for. Then find someone who knows how to listen.