Have a June Grant Deadline? Start Writing Now!
This is a paradoxical intervention, but following this directive with a twist can take some of the stress out of the grant writing process.
From Jane Steinberg, Director of Extramural Activities for NIMH:
Give yourself the gift of time. Start early so you have a chance, not only to let your organization take a look at it and give you some feedback, but find someone who’s not in your lab who can take a look and let you know about what parts may not be as clear as they need to be. It’s very difficult to write in a clear way. And if you can get someone to point out areas that would be helpful you can rewrite, and it really does put you ahead of the crowd to have a clearly written application. This can be the rhetoric of it, the organization of it, the use of headings, how you present things. It can also be something as simple as grammar. And when you are writing sometimes people can do it a little too stream-of-consciousness, and think that the reviewer is following along, but in truth the reviewer has lost the initial referent to the “this” that you’re talking about. And you have…