Are there any strategies one must bear in mind when preparing proposals to decrease the chance of it being misunderstood? A research proposal for funding suffers the risk of outright rejection when read by panel members who are not familiar with the subject of the proposal. Are there any strategies one must bear in mind when preparing proposals to decrease the chance of it being misunderstood? Or, is there nothing we can do at all to influence this, apart from resubmitting if it is rejected, with the hope that it will fall into the hands of reviewers who will look at it favourably? Someone told me that as many as 50% of Nobel prize winners had their Nobel prize-winning research proposals rejected in the first place. 

I am preparing my first proposal (it is actually the second, but I withdrew the first, so this one is technically my first), which will hopefully go through the whole process of review and acceptance/rejection.
In my organization, we address this challenge with two rounds of internal review before a proposal is submitted:


Pink Team: reviews the ideas and storyline of the proposal, typically as a fleshed-out outline but before significant effort has been invested in writing.  This is intended to identify major gaps and allow course corrections to be made before major effort is invested in writing.
Red Team: reviews a near-final draft document, reading in detail and checking for compliance with proposal requirements.


We'll typically use 2-4 people for these teams, of which one should have expertise in the material and one should not be an expert, in order to provide an outside perspective.  Often we'll use the same people for both teams.

Doing this makes proposals much stronger, but generally requires that you start them earlier, in order to be able to have time to really incorporate feedback.