 |
|
|
|
| |
|
CHAPTER 5
Writing Grant Proposals
David Bauer is one of the more successful grant-writing gurus. He puts on workshops, sells his book entitled The "HOW TO" Grants Manual, and hands out a neat notebook to help his workshop attendees organize themselves into competitive grant writers. I like a good deal of his material because it offers a program that can be useful if suitably tailored to our purposes.
The problem I see with his material and many other similar resources, however, is that often they are too general. The good ideas don't seem to really apply to us, or they require a substantial bit of translation to be useful to us. They also give me the impression that our positions are split in unusual ways: something like 110 percent grant proposal development, 20 percent teaching, and 80 percent research.
I operate from the point of view that grant proposals can help us attain some of our personal and professional goals. The proposals are not, in and of themselves, our major goals.
(I mention personal and professional goals out of a background as a contributing editor in the American Entomologist. I write brief columns on careers in science. The idea is to recognize that we can set a personal goal to attain a particular professional success. But let us not further digress.)
We want to spend some time thinking about the details of writing our grant proposals. One thing I like about the David Bauer approach is that he starts by recognizing that developing a major competitive grant proposal can appear to be an overwhelming task. He describes a mouse trying to carry off a giant piece of cheese. The mouse, exhibiting an extraordinary wisdom for something that never defended a dissertation, divides the cheese into smaller parts, each of which can be carried away with aplomb.
The suggestion: Divide the large task of developing a competitive grant proposal into smaller, doable chores.
I have a related suggestion. We already have talked about planning with our support personnel to get help with the cover page, budget pages and so forth. This sort of planning can really help break the job down into approachable pieces. For example, we might do some high-powered thinking about the background and significance of our work while our support staff directly assists with grant production by processing some of the routine forms.
* On writing clearly
We have devoted a considerable amount of time to the business of planning a grant proposal production system. The planning stages can be crucial to getting competitive grant proposals out the door, and it would be difficult to over-emphasize planning. Now let's turn the tables just a little bit.
Have you ever heard somebody say, "Well, I reckon I'll just sit down and produce a grant proposal"?
Not likely.
Most of us think in terms of what we actually do: We write grant proposals. By and large, most competitive grant proposals are well-written documents. It follows that we should spend a little time here talking about the business of writing.
* The third deadly sin: platitudinous ponderosity
Most of us focus on our grant proposals, refereed manuscripts, extension bulletins, research reports and class notes with the intensity of a laser beam. We work on our work.
In doing so, sometimes we lose the perspective that everybody else also genuinely works on their work. We may lose sight of the fact that grant reviewers simply do not sit down with a cup of good coffee to enjoy an afternoon with our grant proposal.
In reality, a grant reviewer may have from one to two to something like 30 or 40 grant proposals to read. Reviewers usually are asked to write their reviews of proposals in the confines of a fairly narrow time window.
Serving as a grant reviewer is a service to the granting agency and to the community. Grant reviewers typically add this service to their schedules, without some compensating release from regular duties. Since many grant reviewers are busy people in the first place, we need to be completely aware of grant reviewers' work loads. We may be able to turn our knowledge to a competitive advantage by developing our writing styles to accommodate them. We do that by writing very clearly, and by making our points explicitly. We avoid murky thinking and murky writing, and we do not ask busy reviewers to spend time trying to figure out what we are trying to say.
We write exactly what we want the reviewer to get out of our proposals.
Here is an exaggerated example of the point we want to grasp. Please record the amount of time it takes to read and translate the sentence below into idiomatic English. Do the same thing with the next italicized sentence.
A detached fragment of the terrestrial lithosphere, whether of igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic origin, and whether acquiring its approximation to sphericity through hydraulic action or other attrition, when continuously maintained in motion by reason of the instrumentality of gravitational forces constantly acting to lower its center of gravity, thus resulting in a rotational movement around its temporary axis and with its velocity accelerated by any increase in the angle of declivity, is, because of abrasive action produced by the incessant but irregular contact between its periphery and the contiguous terrain, effectively prevented from acculumating on its external surface any appreciable modicum of the cryptogamous vegetation normally progagated in umbrageous situations under the optimum conditions of undeviating atmospheric humidity, solar radiation, quiescence, and comparative sequestration from erosive agencies.
Time? _____________ minutes |
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Time? _____________ seconds. |
Competitive grant
proposals are well-
written documents.
We do not need to
be particularly good
writers to generate
good writing, but we
do need to be pretty
good rewriters.
|
|
Many faculty members enjoy a certain facility in the English language. We are often quite comfortable with words, and are able to produce interesting, even amusing, formulations. We easily draw upon literary devices, such as metaphor, allusion and simile, to express ourselves.
Without a little self-discipline, we let ourselves slip into phrasical bombast and asinine affectation. We trade a concatenated cogency for something like a jejune babblement. I am particularly given over to this sort of writing because it entertains me.
Most grant reviewers do not have time for that line of entertainment. It is our responsibility to generate simple, readable, declarative sentences. We should eschew obfuscation.
There are many, many resources on writing, and this handbook is not meant to be one of them. This section is only a reminder that competitive grant proposals are well-written documents. Some resources on writing are listed in the bibliography for individuals who want to have a look at one or two.
The one resource I keep right at my fingertips is my wrinkled, smeared, paperback copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I use it when editing, going through my drafts of papers, sometimes even when writing a letter or memo. It helps me because my memory seems wired to recall numbers and patterns, but not to recall simple rules about writing. As a result, I am constantly looking up 'that and which' (page 59) to remind myself about which of the two words to use when.
Returning to the point: Competitive grant proposals are well-written documents. We do not need to be particularly good writers to generate good writing, but we do need to be pretty good rewriters. Let's apply this thinking to the narrative section of the grant proposal.
My idea is just write it: bang, bang, bang, with no concern for anything except getting the background, the significance and the work we want to do down on paper. Spelling, grammar, clarity and logic all can flap in the breeze!
The beauty of computers and word processors is that everything is right there on a disk (or whatever you call it) and, once our narrative is written, we can work on it.
Make no mistake: We work on it.
There are a couple of ways to work on making our proposals quite clear. One way is to ask ourselves a few questions. After we have dealt with these questions, we also can arrange to have our proposals reviewed before we submit them.
Here are some of the questions we might ask:
* Are the objectives stated in a few crystalline clear statements?
For example, do we want to:
1. Establish the correct laboratory conditions to assay the enzyme "Tenure Synthetase," then use these conditions to perform an initial characterization of the enzyme, then use optimal assay conditions to begin purification of the enzyme (using sequential steps of precipitation, various chromatography columns and electrophoretic technologies), which will be used to establish the significance of this enzyme in academic careers and grant getting,
or
2. characterize "Tenure synthetase"?
* Does the background and significance section develop a story that can be followed easily without a detailed personal knowledge of your field?
We can use this section of our proposals to introduce the general field of our research, establish the significance of the field and of our particular work in the field, and to place the work we want to do into context. In outline form, we write something like this:
* Are the objectives stated in a few crystalline clear statements?
In general terms: Well, okay, here is a line of work that is interesting.
Still in general terms: The work is important because the health, happiness, personal satisfaction and spiritual wholeness of every man, woman and child on our planet, as well as all their pets and domestic food animals, depend upon it.
Shifting to specifics: The particular work that we want to do directly advances the mission of whoever happens to be reading this proposal because&emdash;here we strive to express how our work fits into their mission. I have a friend who goes so far as to work in the same language the granting agency uses to describe its mission. The point is to very explicitly show the match between our work and their mission.
If our proposals are
not clear to an
outside, intelligent
person, they almost
certainly are not
going to be clear to a
grant review panel.
|
|
Specific: Now let's move into a brief, clear, crystal clear, handbell clear, nothing-less-than-enlightening summary of the extant literature. We want to guide our gentle readers to a focused point, at which it becomes clear, compellingly clear, that the next, and possibly only, worthwhile advance in the field will come from the work we have identified.
* Does the preliminary data section make the points that the work can be done, and that we are well-qualified to do the work?
We use the preliminary data section to make two points. First, all the work in the proposal can be accomplished. This relates to our ability to do the work.
If our experiments require that we have the skilled hands that can insert microprobes into individual brain cells, then we need to present some preliminary data to show that we are competent to insert the microprobes and acquire data from the probes and analyze the data and make sense of the data. We use the preliminary data section to convince the reviewers that we are able to do the work, and that we have the wherewithal to do the work.
The second point we make in the preliminary data section is that the work has a sound theoretical basis. Imagine a grant proposal to study the flight behavior of lobsters. Our reviewer thinks, "Wow! this is a really neat series of elegantly designed experiments." Then someone across the table wonders aloud, "do lobsters fly?"
Sounds silly, but many grant proposals fail to fly because the proposer did not establish a sound basis for the study. If we are interested in characterizing a particular enzyme, it is most helpful to show the enzyme is present in our system. If we want to study the economics of growing kiwi fruit in Nebraska, we ought to show that kiwi grow here.
Preliminary data send two important messages: We are competent to do the work in the proposal, and the work has a sound theoretical basis.
* Does the experimental design make sense?
We want to convey three points in this section of the proposal.
1. We make clear what experiments we plan to conduct.
2. We say why we plan to do these experiments.
3. We tell the reviewers what gains will emerge from these experiments.
As with all sections of our proposals, this needs to be startlingly clear.
Many proposals begin with a few small paragraphs on the general methodologies that will support all the work. Throughout the proposal we can refer to these methods as appropriate for individual experiments.
We try to express our experiments in straightforward, simple language so the information can be filed in the reader's mind in an easy way. Many proposals have one experiment for each major objective in the proposal, then develop sub-experiments that give the detailed work plans.
After listing the experiment, we can give a little background from the literature to show why the experiment is important. We want to create a sort of balance here: give enough information to make the point, without going into such detail that the reader becomes frustrated or that the point of the experiment gets lost in the fog.
Finally, we can write a short statement on gains: What will we gain from this experiment?
* Is there a reasonable timetable to show when the work will be performed?
I was once, but only once, soundly criticized for not including a timetable in a grant proposal. Now I include a little chart to show, in rather general terms, when each piece of work will be conducted.
Timetables are not binding contracts. It is well recognized that some lines of work, especially in research, are difficult, and we cannot set precise schedules about a particular experiment. On the other hand, we can show that we have given some careful thought about what work we are doing, and about the rate of progress we anticipate.
The thrust of these comments is that we always can work on a draft of our grant proposals. It is usually pretty easy to make a story flow smoothly. We can simplify our descriptions of the methods we plan to use. By giving ourselves some extra time, we can rewrite and rewrite, making things clearer, smoothing the flow, each time improving our competitive posture.
After dealing with questions of this sort for awhile, we might move on to a pre-submission reivew.
* The pre-submission review makes proposals more competitive
Many research institutes gain all their support from various granting agencies. I used to work in one. It is not surprising to learn these research organizations develop, at all levels, a culture of successful grant writing. There are several elements of the culture.
First, members of the professional staff are usually involved in work you might expect to be pretty fundable. Second, some of the support staff are fairly expert in producing grant proposals. They usually know all about the boiler plate, submission times, and things of that sort.
Research institutes usually insist on pre-submission reviews. Sometimes they go to the extent of employing individuals who do the reviewing. Sometimes these individuals are former editors or English teachers. The idea is they are not scientists, and certainly not schooled in the technical aspects of any one line of research.
Instead, they are outside, intelligent readers, crucial to the success of research institutes.
Pre-reviewing grant proposals in this way tells us where our proposals are weak. If our proposals are not clear to an outside, intelligent person, they almost certainly are not going to be clear to a grant review panel.
Let's put a positive spin on this: If the proposal is not clear to our outside reviewers, we can improve it before we submit it to the granting agency.
We can draw upon all sorts of people to help us. Colleagues from other institutes, people down the hall and friends in other fields all can serve as good outside readers.
We vastly improve our chances of success if our proposals are understandable.
|
  |
|
|
|
|
|
