It is grant-writing season here in snowy Finland, and to keep away from the actual work, I thought I’d write a couple of posts on grant-writing tips. Today we’ll be all nice, but in the next episode, we’ll get a bit naughty because that might in the end bring us more gifts. Ho ho ho.

Let’s start at the very beginning. When writing a grant, the most important thing for you to understand is what is going through the heads of your target audience—the reviewers. You are writing the grant to persuade them to recommend you to get funded. Your one and only task is to make this as easy as possible for them.

This simple rule — to make it as easy as possible for the reviewers to recommend funding the proposal — gives rise to many corollaries.

To arrive at those, consider the situation that the reviewers find themselves in. It is very rare to get a single proposal to review that is spot on in the reviewer’s own subfield. What is more common is that there is a large pile of proposals on the reviewer’s desk, they are almost but not entirely off-topic, the deadline was last week, the reviewer has barely slept because the kids are sick, and even the coffee has gotten cold.

In this situation, the reviewer will be very, very grateful if you make her task easier.

This means, among others, that a) the proposal must be easy to understand, even to a non-expert, b) the proposal’s value and level of ambition must be immediately visible, c) the proposal must contain direct answers to the questions that the reviewer has to answer, and d) the proposal must not contain any more stuff than is necessary to convince the reviewer.

The first corollary requires that you’ve actually given your research plan enough thought so that you can understand it yourself—in other words, you must know what you are doing. It helps a lot to have a clear focus: it is a common beginner’s mistake to try to squeeze all your ideas into one proposal, which then reads like a confusing superposition of several muddled research plans. Focus on a single topic and your best idea to avoid confusing the reviewers because otherwise, they won’t know which of your parallel plans they should be rating. Confused people are rarely happy people, and only happy people give top ratings!

Being easy to understand also means well-written: reading a good grant proposal shouldn’t feel taxing. Avoid jargon and complicated sentences; always err on the side of simplicity. Also, your proposal should not read like lecture notes because the proposal is not about teaching the reviewers. Nothing is as annoying as being lectured to if you only want to get your reviews done!

The proposal should contain enough information to convince the reviewers of how and why you plan to do what you plan to do, but no more than that. Again, think of the poor reviewer who has 20 proposals on her desk: do you think that she is happy to try to become an expert in 20 new topics by reading about a metric ton of intricate details under heavy time pressure, with cold coffee and cranky kids demanding attention? I don’t think so.

That being said, there is one spot in the proposal where you can be a bit difficult to understand on purpose, but let’s leave that for the next part of this series.

Being easy to understand also means no bulls*it: no fluff or fancy-sounding, big words that mean nothing. For god’s sake, no ChatGPT-produced text because it is full of the above, unless you really, really know how to use it. Write the text yourself. Write concisely, simply, and powerfully. Write like you mean it.

The second corollary demands that you make your case clear directly and very early on. Here, my suggestion is to start with a summary paragraph that is almost enough to win the grant for you. More about this later.

The third corollary — the proposal must contain direct answers to the questions that the reviewers have to answer — is hugely important as well. This requires you to do a bit of reconnaissance: the reviewer guidelines and/or review forms of many grant agencies are public. Get them. Study them. Learn them by heart. Find out what specific questions the reviewers are asked, and make sure that your text contains copy-pasteable answers to each, preferably well-highlighted (in italics, or so), so that in a hurry, the reviewers can recycle your text in their statement. Make sure that your answers are winners and that it is easy for the reviewer to give them full points.

Lastly, clarity and readability are often in direct conflict with the amount of stuff in a proposal. Again, a common beginner’s mistake is to cram in as much text as possible, fiddling with the margins or font sizes and using stamp-sized figures, etc. In contrast, the pros choose what elements to include and then focus on those, leaving enough white space and room to breathe. Don’t make the reviewers choke on the amount of stuff they have to ingest! Focus on what matters. Quality instead of quantity.

That’s all for today. In the next episode, we’ll put on our black hats and talk about some Jedi mind tricks, stolen from the evil folks who write ad copy that makes you buy stuff that you don’t need. Stay tuned!