In the first part of this grant-writing mini-series, we learned the fundamental secret of grant-writing (and, in fact, any writing): everything revolves around the reader. The only purpose of a grant proposal is to make it easy for the reviewer to recommend funding.

Let’s break that statement down. For the reviewer to recommend funding, she has to feel that what you aim to do is important, novel, and feasible, and that you are exactly the right person/team to do this. In more touchy-feely terms, the reviewer has to like the proposal. And you.

As we discussed in the previous post, this is much more likely to happen if the proposal doesn’t make the reviewer work too hard: it should be focused, clearly written, and provide clear answers to the questions the reviewer must address.

To help with the above, we’ll now address writing at the level of paragraphs and sentences, borrowing some tricks from professional copywriters who craft advertising text. These techniques not only involve gently manipulating the reader—all writing is about manipulating the reader!—but also aim to ensure that the text flows. An ad where the reader gets lost or bored is a failed ad.

Let’s begin at the beginning because it is the most important place. In any writing, the first sentence and the first few words have enormous power—”Call me Ishmael”—and you should tap into this power. This is because they prime the reader’s mind for what is to come. They also set the general mood. Begin your proposal with a few strong sentences that almost win the grant! These sentences should summarize your plan and its impact: why is it important to do the things you plan to do? Why are you in a unique position to do this? If your grant is funded, how will the world become a much better place?

This mini-summary serves a dual purpose in priming the reader. Firstly, on an emotional level, the reviewer should feel excited – “This sounds like a great proposal!” If you achieve this, the reviewer will have a positive bias from the very beginning. However, with a weak or muddled beginning, you’ll need to work hard to win them over. Secondly, it is much easier for the reviewer to follow the text when they know where it is going — easier in terms of both comprehension and how reading the text feels (these two are, in fact, the same).

There is another place of power: endings. The power of endings is different from that of beginnings: whereas beginnings prime the reader, the endings are what the reader remembers. This is because between paragraphs and between sections there is a break in reading, where the stream of input to the reader’s brain temporarily ceases. This leaves more space for whatever the last input was to echo around in the reader’s head.

Saving important bits to the end is a common copywriter trick—ever seen an ad with “click here to buy” in the middle?

However, this trick works best for short sections and well-written text. If you lose your readers along the way, they won’t reach the end. Remember the overworked, sleep-deprived reviewer from the last post? She might be tempted to just skim, you know. To mitigate this risk, write short paragraphs ensuring that the reader makes it through to their end—and write them well. For section endings, a strong recap sentence — perhaps as a separate paragraph—can do wonders. “In summary, my research can be expected to have an enormous impact, because…”

We’ve now covered beginnings and endings. What is left is how to get from the former to the latter. Here, a copywriter’s trick is to understand that while the sentences must deliver information — including enough details of your research plan to judge its feasibility, etc — their task is also to propel the reader forward. In ad copy, the primary task of every sentence is to make the reader read the next!

This means that the sentences should seamlessly flow into one another, which is a general sign of good writing regardless of the genre. This is particularly important for information-dense grant proposals: information is much, much easier to absorb through a narrative than when it is presented as disconnected bits and pieces. The narrative is what keeps the reader going: as humans, we’ve enjoyed stories since the dawn of man, singing around campfires.

For a grant, the narrative is particularly important for sections prone to being dense, taxing, and boring—imagine the sleep-deprived reviewer having to wade through 25 poorly written state-of-the-art sections! This is especially crucial if the section is at the proposal’s beginning, as state-of-the-art sections often are. So next time when writing one, consider the reviewer, and instead of just listing references, write a story of how your field of science has evolved to the point where you can both ask and answer your research question.

Finally, as I mentioned in the previous post, there is one spot in the proposal where you can be slightly difficult to understand on purpose, in particular, if the reviewer is not really in your (sub)field and your proposal involves theory/maths/data analysis/similar.

This is in the methods section, or whatever the section where you describe what you are going to do is called. Whereas the research question and its importance should be written with absolute clarity so that everyone can understand them, here you can show off a bit. The point is to give the impression that you really know your stuff. Even though your proposal should generally be as free of jargon as humanly possible, it doesn’t hurt to have one strategically placed sentence where you flex your claws, show that you can devour your field’s most complicated concepts for breakfast, and instill a bit of fear and awe in the reviewer. Then you can be all nice again, and wait for the gifts to arrive.

I wish you merry grant-writing!