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Imagine you’re a hungry restaurant patron, and when you walk in the door, the waiter hands you a stack of recipes, instead of a menu, to choose your food from.

The recipes don’t do anything to describe how the food will look or taste, they only tell you how the chef will make that particular item. They go into detail about how the potatoes must be skinned, the batter must be mixed, and so on. Because they waste so much space on the recipes, there’s not much attention paid to explaining the finished culinary characteristics.

The above scenario might be great for the true foodie who understands what all the ingredients are doing for the dish, but for everyone else it would be a turn off. It’s likely the restaurant would go out of business (unless it had a weird sort of success by generating a cult/alternative following… you never know).

How this relates to your grant

This example is important to understand if you’re writing grants and want them funded.

Many grant writers I encounter are totally focused on the details of how they’re going to do the work. They’re so focused on those details that they give short shrift to other key elements. Basically, what they end up writing is one big long “recipe.”

Jane the restaurant-goer

To understand the problem with this, let’s go back to the restaurants for a moment. Imagine Jane, with a stack of 12 menus to read before she can decide which restaurant to go to.

Let’s say that two of those menus are well-written. They are clear, well-organized, and most importantly, they explain the finished culinary characteristics of each item. They list (in small print below each item) the important ingredients, but they don’t go into details about exactly how those ingredients are prepared (i.e. they don’t mention skinning the chicken or pressing the soybeans before cooking them, because the patron doesn’t need to know those things). They also have appealing names for each item.

The other ten of those twelve menus are a bunch of recipes for plain-sounding dishes like “chicken soup” and “chocolate chip cookies”. They might occasionally mention a culinary characteristic, but because the recipes are so detailed, there’s not much room for describing anything but the cooking steps.

If Jane is an average human, she’s going to be far more likely to pick one of the restaurants that has a normal menu. She’ll be more excited about them, because the menu has helped her visualize how the food items will look and taste.

Bob the grant-reviewer

Bob also has a set of menu choices, but in this case they’re grant proposals. Like Jane, he is limited to choosing one or at most two to advocate for – and he must be excited about that one if it is going to have a hope of being considered in the larger study section.

Guess what type of grant proposal Bob is more likely to get excited about? Will it be the one that just focuses on all the details of the recipe(s)? Or will it be the one that starts with a clear explanation of why the project is appealing in the first place, what it will do for the world (or agency), leaving the “recipe” for a smaller portion of the proposal?

If Bob is an average human, he’s going to go for the grant that most appealingly presents the project, and backs it up with evidence that the applicants are likely to succeed at that project. He doesn’t care too much about the recipe’s details. Perhaps he needs to know a few key details (are they using lard or olive oil in the recipe?), but he doesn’t need to know everything.

You may object: what about the people who do want to know all the details? There are the occasional reviewers who love to dive into the details of how (the recipe), without knowing why (will the finished food be good?) – but those are in the minority.

Since each grant is usually reviewed by 2-3 people (sometimes more), it is rare indeed that all of them are interested in the minutiae of how.

Why this concept is vital

If you deeply understand this one concept, you get what differentiates a great proposal from one not so great. It is at the core of all great grant writing, because it is all about helping your reviewer make an “easy choice” of your project. You can only do that if you step beyond the recipe, and help the reviewer form an exciting picture of your successful project in their mind – much like the restaurant patron anticipating a great meal.

For more free grant writing tips

For a series of new, free videos, including a free NIH specific aims template and video showing you how to use it, browse over here.

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Morgan Giddings, PhD is the author of Four Steps To Funding, and has been tenured faculty at UNC Chapel Hill in three departments with fancy sounding names. She will soon be moving to a smaller institution to free up a bit of time to help others optimize their career success.