Why academics have a hard time writing good grant proposals.(Author abstract)

Introduction

When they are new to the grant game, even scholars with fine publishing records can struggle with proposal writing. Many are surprised to find that the writing style that made them successful as academics is not well suited to crafting a winning proposal. To succeed at grant writing, most researchers need to learn a new set of writing skills.

Academic Writing

For purposes of this discussion "academic writing" is defined as that style commonly adopted for scholarly papers, essays, and journal articles. The following is a typical example:

Look at the Difference

To start, glance at the first pages in any sampling of winning grant proposals. The first thing you notice is that they look different from pages in typical academic journals. Sentences are shorter, with key phrases underlined or bolded to make them stand out. Lists are printed bullet style. Graphs, tables and drawings abound. Now read the pages more carefully. The writing is more energetic, direct and concise. The subject matter is easy to understand, as there are fewer highly technical terms. Each time you learn something about a subject entirely new to you. You are intrigued by exciting new ideas that have a good chance for success. In short, you quickly agree that the review panels made the right choices in funding these proposals.

The lesson here is a hard one for beginners: Success in grant writing is a matter of style and format as much as content. Make no mistake--the best written proposal will not win money for a weak idea. But it is also true that many good ideas are not funded because the proposal is poorly written (New & Quick, 1998; Steiner, 1988). Sometimes the failure is due to a weak or missing component that is key to a good proposal. The research plan may be flawed or incomplete. The evaluation methods might be inadequate. The researchers may not be qualified to carry out the work. But all too often, the core problem in a failed proposal lies in the writing itself, which bears too many characteristics of academic prose. (A baffled professor once came to my office bearing the written critiques he had received from reviewers of a failed proposal, One of them included this killer remark: "Reads like a journal article.")

Contrasting Perspectives

To understand the dimensions of the overall problem, consider the contrasting perspectives of academic writing versus grant writing:

Scholarly Pursuit versus Sponsor Goals

Driven to make unique contributions to their chosen fields, scholars habitually pursue their individual interests, often with a good deal of passion. When seeking financial support for these endeavors, however, many find that potential sponsors simply do not share their enthusiasm.

"A sound concept, but it does not fit our current funding priorities," or similar phrases, are commonly found in letters that deny funding. With the exception of a few career development programs, funding agencies have little interest in advancing the careers of ambitious academics. Sponsors will, however, fund projects that have a good chance of achieving their goals. This is why seasoned grant writers devote a good deal of time parsing grant program announcements, highlighting passages that express what the sponsors want to accomplish, and what kind of projects they will pay for. Then the writers adopt a service attitude, finding ways to adapt their expertise to match the sponsor's objectives. Finally, they test their ideas with grant program officers before deciding to write a proposal. As one of our university's consistently successful grant writers put it: "My epiphany came when I realized that grant programs do not exist to make me successful, but rather my job is to make those programs successful."

Past versus Future Orientation

In academic writing, the researcher is describing work that has already been done: Literature has been reviewed, an issue examined, a thesis presented, a discovery made, a conclusion drawn. Grant writers, by contrast, describe in detail work that they wish to do. For some disciplines, good grant writing can be viewed as science fiction, i.e., it must be grounded in solid science, but the research design itself is a set of logical yet imagined activities that have yet to take place. This in itself is a major shift in perspective that seasoned scholars find difficult when starting to write proposals.

Theme-Centered versus Project-Centered

Scholarly writers are prone to dwell on theme, thesis and theory. Essays and books can be devoted to the authors' original thinking, contributions of past and present scholars, or the evolution of entire schools of thought. They draw us into the realm of ideas. Grant writers, however, draw us into a world of action. They start by sketching out an important problem, then they move quickly to describing a creative approach to addressing that problem with a set of activities that will accomplish specific goals and objectives. The overall project is designed to make a significant contribution to a discipline or to a society as a whole.

Academic writers often seek funding to "study," "examine," or "explore" some theme or issue. But this can be deadly, as sponsors rarely spend money on intellectual exploration. They will, however, consider funding activities to accomplish goals that are important to them. It is the project that interests them, not just the thinking of the investigator. Finally, academic essays end with their authors' final conclusions, while grant proposals end with their projects' expected outcomes.

Expository versus Persuasive Rhetoric

The academic writer uses language to explain ideas, issues and events to the reader. The aim is to build a logical progression of thought, helping the reader to share the writer's intellectual journey and to agree with the core themes of the piece, But the language in a grant has to be stronger; it must sell a nonexistent project to the reader. The writer has to convince the reviewer that the proposed research is uniquely deserving. The whole effort is geared toward building a winning argument, a compelling case that scarce dollars should be spent on a truly exceptional idea that has an excellent chance for success. Grant reviewers are a notoriously skeptical lot who reject a majority of proposals, so writers must use language strong enough to win their reluctant support. In effect, a good proposal is an elegant sales pitch.

Impersonal versus Personal Tone

From their undergraduate term papers to their doctoral dissertations and numerous papers that followed, scholars have been conditioned to generate prose in proper academic style-cautious, objective and dispassionate, exclusively focused on the topic, with all evidence of the writer's persona hidden from view. Grant writers, however, seek the reviewers' enthusiastic endorsement; they want readers to be excited about their exemplary projects, so they strive to convey their own excitement. They do this by using active voice, strong, energetic phrasing, and direct references to themselves in the first person. Here are some examples:

Sentences like these violate editorial rules of many scholarly journals.

Solo Scholarship versus Teamwork

With the exception of co-authored work, academic writing is mostly a solo activity. Perched at a desk, in the library or at home in the den, the solitary scholar fills page after page with stolid academic prose. When the paper or book chapter is completed, it may be passed to one or two readers for final proofing, but the overall endeavor is highly individualistic. Good grant writing, however, requires teamwork from the outset. Because their ultimate success depends upon nearly unanimous approval from a sizeable group of reviewers, grant writers place high value on feedback at every phase of proposal writing. Before the first draft, a thumbnail sketch of the basic concept will be sounded out with colleagues before sending it on to a grant program officer to test whether the idea is a good fit. Large multi-investigator proposals are typically broken into sections to be written and rewritten by several researchers, then compiled and edited by the lead writer. Many large proposals are submitted to a "red team" for internal review before sending them out to the funding agencies. Even single investigator proposals have been combed over repeatedly as the documents move from first draft to the final product. Proposals that bypass this essential process have a much greater chance of failure.

Length versus Brevity

Verbosity is rewarded in academe. From extended lectures to journals without page limits, academics are encouraged to expound at great length. A quick scan of any issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals the degree to which simple ideas can be expanded to multiple pages. A common technique is to stretch sentences and paragraphs to extreme lengths. Consider the following example, which won a Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature:

An extreme example perhaps, but its characteristics can be seen in many scholarly essays.

Grant reviewers are impatient readers. Busy people with limited time, they look for any excuse to stop reading. They are quickly annoyed if they must struggle to understand the writer or learn what the project is all about. Worse, if the proposal does not intrigue them by the very first page, they will not read any further (unless they must submit a written critique, in which case they immediately start looking for reasons to justify why the proposal should not be funded). When asked to describe the characteristics of good grant writing, senior reviewers put qualities such as "clear" and "concise" at the top of the list (Porter, 2005). Brevity is not only the soul of wit; it is the essence of grantsmanship. Or, to cite Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum about modern architecture: "Less is more."

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