Here are a few random notes after reading through mountains of proposals

Terms. Keep in mind your audience - many reviewers are from outside of geography and social science. Many of the words we take for granted will likely not mean anything to other people. Or, the reviewer understands what the word is but the word is being used as shorthand for what the author really means.By all means use these terms in order to convey the specialist what you need to say, but be sure you provide enough context to make their meaning clear, or provide a definition, to non specialists.

• discourse analysis, GIS, etc. - don't assume that the reviewers will know any given method (e.g., "I will use a GIS (software for the storage, manipulation, and analysis of digital maps) to examine...". This is clunky, but better than ticking off reviewers. Similarly, don't assume for second that anyone knows your subfield - political ecology, for example, is a foreign concepts to many reviewers
• coupled human-environmental system - I use this term a lot, but I have to take care to back it up very quickly
• interventions - be wary of this term if you are not referring to a gathering of people confronting a friend on his/her substance abuse problem. There are good reasons to use this term in certain subfields (for as long as it remains trendy) but immediately back it up (e.g., "The conceptual contributions are..., the methodological contributions are...).
• landscapes - especially when you are not taking about the common usage of fields with cows and so on. "Landscapes of the mind" or "Landscape of the subaltern" needs more.
• material practices, materiality - for a lot of scientists, social scientists, and people in the humanities, these term 'materiality' has no real meaning
• other, otherness
• signifier/resignify
• sites
• spaces - "spaces of resistance"
• spatiality - "spatiality of power relations"
• sustainability - overuse has made this an almost a meaningless concept
• terrain (esp. when you are using it metaphorically)

Abstract. Provide a single, clear abstract even if they don't ask for one.

Font. Consider using a serif font like Times – it is easier for a reviewer on his or her 60 th proposal.