Avoid Common Proposal Pitfalls

Proposal writing has always been a competitive endeavor, and it will become increasingly so. Overworked reviewers, faced with higher and higher stacks of quality applications, often resort to the most expedient means to narrow the field—they look for reasons to reject any given application, regardless of the merit of the researcher’s basic idea. Here are some tips to avoid a quick rejection:

1. Before starting, verify your project’s match with the agency’s funding priorities. A brief letter, e-mail or phone call to a contact person or program director will often elicit quick feedback as to your project’s fit with the research themes the agency intends to support. It also opens up a line of communication, which can be invaluable as the proposal is developed.

    

2. Begin by proving the importance of your proposed project. Constructing a strong proposal narrative is not like writing for a professional journal. State your argument in plain language up front; don’t make the reviewer wade through paragraph after paragraph before you get around to showing why scarce grant funds really should be expended on your project.

    

3. Assume your reviewers are uninformed but very quick to learn. Reviewers may not be readily familiar with current issues and theories in your field. Write in a way that permits a perceptive reader to grasp quickly what he/she needs to know about your project and how it fits into a larger field of inquiry. Avoid technical jargon and insider acronyms.
   
    
4. Use pictures and charts to illustrate your research design. The more you visualize your project activities and timelines with a single chart or two, the better. Again, think of the frazzled reviewer plowing through page after page of dense prose, trying to get a sense of what this project will actually look like, if funded. Show it before you tell it.
   
    
5. Do not deviate from any application guideline, even by a nanobit. You may not consider the size of the font or the width of a margin to be important, but the bleary-eyed reviewer does.
   
    
6. Pay attention to all the proposal review criteria. It is not enough to demonstrate the importance of your research goals; you must also show how your project will support other objectives that are important to the funding agency. Enhancing diversity, societal benefits, integrating research with education and an effective project management plan are some the criteria reviewers can use to winnow out proposals that are insufficiently developed.
   
    
7. Be sure the abstract describes the entire scope of your project. The abstract has to be more than just the first two paragraphs of your project narrative; it must convey what you intend to do, why it is important, what has already been done, and how you will do the work. For some reviewers (financial officers, for example) it may be the only thing they read.

    

8. Ask seasoned colleagues to review sections of the proposal before finalizing it. Constructive feedback from colleagues can mean extra points in the final rounds of a competitive review. Check your ego at the door and forget about pride of authorship. Simply assume that you and your co-investigators are too close to the project to be truly objective.
   
    
9. Before submitting, engage proofreaders who are not involved with the project. Innocuous typos and inconsistencies between the project narrative and the budget, no matter how minor, can doom a proposal at the outset. Sharp readers who are not part of the project team can ferret out mistakes much more consistently than you can.

    

10. Give yourself time to write, rewrite and rewrite. Enough said.