If You Have a June Grant Deadline, You Should Be Starting Writing Now
Thoughts from my coaching grant writing
Revised from Jane Steinberg, Director of Extramural Activities for NIMH:
Treat yourself by starting early. This gives you the advantage of allowing your team to review your work and offer feedback. Additionally, seek someone outside your laboratory to critique your work, especially for clarity in parts that may be confusing.
Writing clearly is challenging. By having someone identify areas that need improvement, you have the opportunity to refine your work, setting your application apart from others. This includes enhancing the rhetoric, structure, use of headings, presentation, and even basic grammar. Avoid writing in a stream-of-consciousness style that assumes the reviewer can follow complex trains of thought without clear references. Ensure your writing is redundant for clarity and explicit in conveying your hypothesis and its significance. Remember, reviewers evaluate your research idea based on your written application, not the idea itself, so clarity and explicitness are key.