BIOS 587 FALL 2004

WRITING YOUR GRANT PROPOSAL: PITFALLS TO AVOID

To get a grant funded, you must write a proposal that catches the reader’s interest with the first sentence, which states what your research problem is and how you intend to solve it. You must persuade the reader that your proposal has the potential to add important incremental knowledge to your field. You must present yourself as the careful thinker who can formulate a problem precisely, develop the necessary experiments to achieve results, and interpret those results within the context of your field. You must, in other words, market your project as one that should be funded and yourself as a person who can carry out the project.

To be persuasive, you must define the specific problem you intend to research, indicate its importance, detail the experimental method(s) you propose to use, place the problem in the intellectual context of your field, detail accomplished and expected results, identify your potential unique contribution, and suggest the possible theoretical or practical relevance of your findings.

Below are pitfalls likely to keep your proposal from being funded. For each I suggest possible solutions.

  1. PITFALL: Your writing sounds wooden and too formal, as if an intelligent robot had produced it to be read by an intelligent robot.

SOLUTION:

  • Visualize a reviewer reading your proposal, and write directly to that person, so that you sound like an enthusiastic applicant writing to an interested human being. Keep in mind that yours may be Grant Proposal 219, which is being read right after lunch or at the end of a long day. If you don’t attract interest in the first paragraph, your proposal may not get read. There is a lot of competition for research dollars.
  • Explain; don’t merely tell. Keep in mind that though the reader will be highly qualified, he or she may not be intimately familiar with the specific research you are proposing that they fund for three years.
  • Let your enthusiasm show. If you sound boring, you are. If you’re not enthusiastic, fake it.
  • Read your writing out loud; if you have trouble getting through the sentence, it’s too long or too complicated. Chances are you need to restructure it. Ask yourself, “What am I trying to say here?” Answer your question, and then write it down. A spoken explanation almost always clarified your thinking. You can’t use contractions or slang in a grant proposal, but a human voice needs to show in the writing.
  • Try for active, precise verbs rather than relying on wordy passive voice.
  1. PITFALL: As you read it, you think, “This isn’t very clear, but they probably won’t notice.”

SOLUTION: Realize that “they” WILL notice. Chances are you don’t understand that portion very well yourself. Think it through, jot down notes, and then rewrite the section. It may help you to read samples of other authors explaining similar concepts. For example, use search engines to find online journal articles or biotech company websites that contain explanations of methods, limitations of techniques, necessary controls, etc.

  1. PITFALL: Incomplete sequence. You think you’ve put in all the necessary steps, but another reader says, “I don’t understand how you got from “there” to “here.”

SOLUTION:

  • You may be too familiar with the work to notice the gaps. Read it as if you were someone else and be sensitive to the “huh?” moments.
  • Ask someone else to read it and to look particularly for gaps in the argument or in the steps of the proposed experiments.
  • Ask someone else to read your work out loud to you. You will notice gaps and omitted information that you skimmed over when you read the pages silently.
  • Use numbered lists to indicate chronological sequences, bulleted lists to indicate items equally weighted. (Do NOT in your proposal give a detailed step-by-step description of the experiment. Focus on the overall rationale of the experiment.)
  • Do some heavy-duty thinking. You may be unsure of what you are trying to say and need to think it through more thoroughly before you try to explain it.
  1. PITFALL: In the Background, the issues are fuzzy or unstated. It’s not clear how your proposed work links with the issues or work already done by others.

SOLUTION:

  • Clearly identify the underlying issues and summarize who has done what.
  • Show what aspects of your work address these issues, how your work links with what others have done.
  • Make clear what niche you are filling to add incrementally to knowledge in your field, and, as you write, make it easy for the grant reader to distinguish your work from that of other researchers.
  1. PITFALL: Confusing organization; confusing content within paragraphs.

SOLUTION:

  • Keep in mind throughout the grant proposal that each section has to grow logically out of what you have just said in the preceding section. Every proposal has to flow like a well plotted movie or story.
  • Outline each section before you begin writing, but be open to new ideas as you write. Thoughts develop during the process of writing, often as you sleep. First drafts are never the best draft.
  • Don’t bury your main point in the middle of a paragraph or section. At the beginning of each paragraph or section, signal your main points; then move to background, illustration, explanation, and detail. We tend to give too much background before getting to what is most important.
  • Write paragraphs based on a topic sentence, with everything in the paragraph illustrating or explaining the topic sentence. We tend to write paragraphs that are additive rather than ones that develop a point. If, as you read a paragraph, something doesn’t fit, get rid of it. Put it elsewhere in a fully developed paragraph of its own if the idea is important.
  • Clearly explain the rationale for experiments before you detail what you will Use sub-headings to signal major divisions.
  • Write paragraphs based on a topic sentence, with everything in the paragraph illustrating or explaining that topic sentence.
  1. PITFALL: Cause and effect are not clearly linked.

SOLUTION:

  • State cause and effect instead of assuming that your reader will do the linking. Be as explicit as “If … then…”
  • If mathematical writing is included, explain in words as well as in the symbols.
  1. PITFALL: Unacceptable grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation.

SOLUTION:

  • Brilliant work, presented poorly, will not sell itself. Become a fanatic about proofreading, but don’t try to proofread for everything at the same time. Proofread first for content errors; then look only for sentence structure and grammatical errors; then do a reading that focuses on errors in your citations; check for punctuation problems, particularly those you tend to make with commas, semicolons, and placement of periods in citations. GrammarCheck programs are not reliable and can actually push you toward serious mistakes.
  • Use SpellCheck, but remember that it merely says that the word exists, not whether it is the correct or precise choice. It will catch a lot of typos, but it can’t substitute for a careful proofreading. Try always for specific rather than general words, “test” rather than “study,” for example.
  • Buy a used copy of a writing handbook such as The Bedford Handbook by Diana Hacker to use as a reference. You don’t need the new expensive 6th edition; you can get an inexpensive 5th edition on the web. The grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure rules are the same in both editions. However, if you need interactive exercises to help you understand the concepts, you may want the 6th edition, which has web links to practice exercises.
  • Find a writing partner (from a different language background if you are an international student); ask that person to read first for content, and then for grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation. Try for someone in your home lab who has writing experience, a post-doc, for example. Do NOT let that person simply edit your work, however, or you’ll never learn to do it for yourself. Intelligent, reasoned self-editing is your goal.
  • Check out of the library, or buy, a copy of Mimi Zeiger’s Essentials ofWriting Biomedical Research Papers, 2nd ed., McGraw Hill, 2000. While it doesn’t deal specifically with writing a Grant Proposal, much of what she says is applicable.

Janice L. Hewitt, Ph.D. The Cain Project, Rice University, 2004

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