Three deadly sins of grant writing
| 4 January, 2011 | Morgan Giddings |
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You’ve just gotten the rejection back, and it stings.
Your reviewers wrote about all sorts of technical issues with your proposal. You scrambled to fix those issues – only to receive another rejection with a different set of “issues”.
Are your reviewers insane?
[pullquote]Are your reviewers insane?[/pullquote]
No, but they’re also not giving you the whole story of why they rejected your grant.
They’re not intentionally hiding information. Rather, they had a gut reaction (like/dislike/hate) to your proposal, and all that stuff they wrote was just a rationalization of their reaction.
It wouldn’t be so great for you or for the reviewer if they just wrote “I didn’t like this proposal, my gut told me so!” They’d never be invited to review again. (Who knows, maybe that’s a strategy to get out of reviewing, like trying to get out of jury duty?)
But anyway: that’s the way we humans make decisions. It almost always starts from a subconscious (‘gut’) reaction, and then we must come up with reasonable sounding words to support that reaction. This justification is not just for other people; it’s for ourselves. It makes our egos feel good, because then we’re fully justified in any decision we made.
If you think you’re immune to that kind of decision-making process, just examine the next few decisions you make. It can be illuminating (and you could also check out the book by Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational).
This brings us back to your grant: the first impression that you make is vitally important if you want the gut reaction to go in your favor. There are lots of ways to help you, and equally there are some ways you can seriously hinder that gut reaction.
Here is my current favorite top-3 list of deadly sins in grant writin, that you’re unlikely to overcome no matter how good your project is:
- Write highly dense, technical prose that is designed only for a specialist in your field to read. Assume that your reader knows everything you know, including all the buzzwords and technical details. Make sure to overwhelm her with all those details in order to impress her. Don’t bother to be educational or make the prose easy to read. We’re all smart, academics with all the time in the world to wade through difficult text, right? Yes, definitely assume that your reader has unlimited time and energy to wade through your grant.
- Don’t bother to thoroughly develop your Specific Aims page before launching into writing the text of your proposal. Just start writing, and ‘see what happens.’ Zigzag around a bit, change what you’re doing, and then keep going back and changing around your aims. Make sure you are doing this up to the last minute, and that you forget to make your aims line up with what you say in your proposal. Not only will you be having a lot of fun in your last-minute writing frenzy, but your reviewer will have the pleasure of consuming your spaghetti writing. He’ll enjoy late nights reading your proposal trying to figure out what you’re proposing to do, much like Sherlock Holmes. Yes indeed, you’ll certainly win praise this way.
- Make sure to dive right into the technical details of your elegant experiments, without giving any background about why the project is important in the first place. Wow your reviewer with your elegant experiments, designed to answer obviously important questions. Don’t worry about the funding agency thinks it’s important work, only worry about whether your experiments are elegant enough that only a buffoon could ignore that fact. And of course assume that elegant experiments equals grant funded, because elegance equals importance.
The bottom line is that you need to make it easy on your reviewer. Each of these sins can be readily avoided if you simply put yourself in your reader’s shoes, realizing that the reader has a tough job, and as a writer, it is your job to make it easier for them.
If you’ve recently had a grant rejected, I suggest you have a look at it from the context of these three deadly sins. Before trying to revise your project or approach, first consider whether you could simply fix things by eliminating these sins from your writing. It is amazing how far that can go.
If you want a series of free training videos on grant writing, including how to write the ‘killer’ specific aims, have a look over here: https://marketyourscience.com/thescientistvids
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Morgan Giddings, PhD trains scientists and academics from all over the world how to get more grant funding and recognition with less stress and effort. She also does research in bioinformatics, proteomics, and genomics to address issues like cancer.
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This is logical and hammers home a point. It’s also a nice way to self promote a persuasive argument that all one’s own grants should be funded because, well, one’s an expert – one’s advice and videos are proof of that. I mean, how can a self-styled expert on grant writing possibly have one’s own grants rejected? It would be like voting out a president for doing a bad job after a 4 year term right? – oh – wait a minute.
I leaned most of these rules by being a reviewer, and they have yet to fail me. When the pay-line gets below the 4th percentile, I may, however, be in trouble.
This is excellent and astute advice if we do actually pay strict attention to it. It may not guarentee funding of course, but it would certainly help place the reviewers in the same corner as the applicant. Nice article.
As a reviewer of numerous grants and awardee of quite few in the past, I disagree with this article. Maybe in the US it is different but try getting a grant these days in the UK if you are not at what is deemed to be an elite University. The chances are pretty abysmal no matter how well organised or clear your proposal is. You may even find yourself , months after your grant has been rejected (in spite of splendid reviews) being asked to review a grant that looks suspiciously similar to the one you had rejected. There is a great deal more to receiving a grant, and excellence in science and a well written grant are not always enough. Who you are and where you may be more relevant.
Just want to add something to the three things listed. The central idea has to be clear and simple. Unfortunately for a lot of competitive renewals, the data is far from clear and simple. The better way to go probably is to write a new grant.
Dr. Giddings provides good advice to grantwriters who are battling the current system of providing research funding. I have written applications to develop a gene therapy for oral cancer that have received glowing reviews about how important this is and how our approach and preliminary data show that we can carry out this research. Although the priority score improved at each resubmission, the R21 grant was not funded. In the meantime an NIDCR program director reported to me that the Institute has no grants supporting a cure for oral cancer!
The problem is much deeper than impressing reviewers with a wisely crafted grant application (Duzgunes; The Scientist, 13(8):13; 12 April, 1999).
1. Members of NIH study sections are likely to be competitors in the same field as the grant applicant. They are unlikely to give the benefit of the doubt to an innovative research proposal that has not already been substantially pursued, particularly when they are struggling to procure research grants themselves.
2. When there are no experts on the review panel in the field of the proposal, reviewers are compelled to come up with some critique, regardless of scientific rigor or accuracy. Since such evaluations are not made by actual peers of the applicant, they are not proper “peer review.” Despite the blatant scientific and factual errors they make, such reviewers are allowed to stay on review panels.
3. Review panels have the freedom to criticize an application in any way they wish, with no requirement to provide specific published references to substantiate their claims. The panels and their members, however, are not accountable for their critique. Revised applications addressing the criticism entail the loss of a complete funding cycle, and can then be criticized on entirely different aspects at the whim of the reviewers.
4. Grant reviews at NIH are partial to projects that are favorites of panel members and to areas of research that are “in vogue.” Reviewers trained in a narrow area are often blind to alternative approaches and different fields of research, which may produce highly significant results.
5. Review panels use criteria including “probability of success” or “level of enthusiasm” when making funding decisions. The former criterion would tend to select projects proposing only incremental advances and reject exploratory research. The latter criterion is highly subjective and unscientific.
6. Review panels expect so much preliminary data to ensure the feasibility of the proposed project that the major part of a discovery needs already to have been made. This implies that NIH is not funding actual discoveries, but merely their further characterization (“mopping up operations”).
7. Feasibility studies must often be conducted with the support of previous grants that were awarded for other purposes. This countermands the detailed description of experiments, since principal investigators are pressured to channel their efforts toward generating preliminary data in addition to, or instead of, performing the funded experiments.
8. Investigators spend a large portion of their time preparing grant applications. This is time not spent on research per se. In the case of currently funded scientists, much of this time is paid for by NIH grants in the form of salary support.
9. The period between application and earliest funding is an unacceptable 10 months, during which time many fields advance rapidly.
10. The review process consumes a significant portion of the reviewers’ time, which is likely to lead to resentment and loss of objectivity, since this is time taken away from their own research activities. NIH officials publicly admit the lack of quality time devoted by the reviewers to this process.
11. The administration of study sections and travel expenses for study-section members cost NIH a nontrivial sum that could be used for actual research.
12. Science progresses via the vision and dedication of individual scientists, as well as chance observations. The tedious description of what a scientist is going to do three or five years from now, as required by NIH grant applications, is an unrealistic exercise in bureaucracy and is contrary to the true nature of scientific research.
13. Although NIH peer review is touted by some as the best possible system for allocating funding, this claim has never been proven by any scientific studies.
14. The current method of funding biomedical science has worked reasonably well in the past when the ratio of funds to the number of investigators was relatively high. Now, however, this method has become a “game scientists play,” and has outlived its usefulness for a society awaiting cures for deadly diseases.
We urgently need to change our paradigms and to develop new ways of allocating funds for biomedical research, as I have outlined elsewhere (Duzgunes, The Scientist, 21(8):24; August, 2007).
No!! Aarrgh. Don’t give the secrets away!
If everyone starts writing clear grants that are easy to read, then however will my applications succeed? Please, please, dear readers, write dense grants that will impress the reviewer with your detailed knowledge. If you receive a trivial comment back on your review, then just assume it is indeed trivial and resubmit without modification. Never assume that the reviewer is reading maybe ten grants, all pretty darned good, and that (if the reviewer is lucky) maybe one of those will actually get funded. Hey, it’s depressing enough being a reviewer. If all the applications come in well-written, how will I ever decide?
Seriously? A well-written grant that understands who the audience (the reviewer) is as important as a similarly, emphathetic and therefore well-delivered lecture. But, the lecture alone is not enough. If the substance isn’t there, it’s just a lecture. Conversely, you may have the best data in the world but if you assume that its importance will be obvious to everybody, you will be disappointed. Think of watching a lecture consisting of bullet point after bullet point of data without any context connecting the points. We always flock to lecturers that present that way, don’t we?
You need to deliver the whole package: exciting results that make someone take notice, a good experimental plan that will deliver unambiguous conclusions on the most exciting possibilities and a the delivery that will not numb the reviewers’ excitement. Finally, as others noted, always assume that others have just as interesting a topic as you do (They do. Honest.). So, you have to stand out from them.
Thanks for the laugh, Fred 🙂
I understand your points, but you have horrible grammar in this post. That makes me question your abilities as a grant writer. Think about the next time you want to offer advice to young (or any) scientists. Academics are the most intellectually judgmental people on the planet, and you’re not doing your blog any favors by posting this kind of stuff if you aren’t going to compose it properly.
A well written grant application certainly helps, but without the substance, it is just that. In the end a quality proposal is always based on good science- whether it gets funded is always based on the quality of peer review. In my substantial experience with the local (Australian) and international peer review, the Australian NHMRC grant review panels are often stacked with inexperience people with mediocre track records, so they make mediocre decisions, often based on personal bias, envy and what they perceive as beneficial to their own careers. NHMRC collects external ‘expert’ reviews on every application, which are supposed to make applicants feel that their applications have received a fair and thorough peer review. The quality of external reviews is usually mixed as it is difficult to find willing reviewers and expertise in a small scientific pool in the country. In the end the outcome and score of an application is decided by the primary spokesperson, with some help from a secondary spokesperson. The rest of panel members, most of whom have not had the time to read applications, usually go along with the spokespersons. So, if the spokesperson(s) do not like the application or the applicants, there is no way the application is going to get up, no matter how wonderfully written it is and whether or not the proposal is based on sound science.
This article is just another attempt to put the blame on the victim. If you didnt get the funding, it is your fault, right? Policies, personal relationships etc, do not play any role. Similar thing to you having a perfect CV that reduces whole HR departments to tears, but there is no jobs around because the market is gone.
Several of you missed the point. I never said that good writing would carry the day. Of course you have to have a great project! Duh!
However, a lot of people I encounter have great projects, then wrap those up in grants that are poorly written. The point of the three tips above is to reduce that problem.
But if you’re not doing great work that gets people excited, it doesn’t matter how well written your proposal.
@Boz – what’s your agenda?
@David – we’ll all be in trouble when paylines go below 4th percentile – or 10th percentile for that matter…. (some institutes are already there)
@Barbara – being at an elite university helps, but will not carry the day.
@Nejat – I agree that the current system is “broken.” My article was not designed to address the problems with the system, but to address how to work within it as it is presently constructed.
@Fred – thanks for the laugh!
@J – for Pete’s sake, chill out. It is just a blog post. Perfectionism is your enemy. It has destroyed far more careers than poor grammar. If you have the time to be persnickety about my grammar in a simple blog post, I’d suggest you examine how you’re spending your time. Is spending your time this way making you happy?
@Sam – see my comment above. I never said that writing a proposal well will carry the day. But if you don’t write your proposal well, the likelihood of funding is almost nil in this environment. It is a one-way conditional clause.
@A – You have two choices in life. You can say “I’m a victim” and lie around bemoaning that – or you can figure out what went wrong and fix it. The people who accomplish everything (i.e. are successes) are those who choose the second path. They don’t sit around pointing fingers. Just imagine – what if the Wright brothers had sat around blaming their failed early flight attempts on bad weather, low hills, bad contractors? Instead, they figured out what went wrong and fixed it. You should too, if you want success.
Apparently grant writing hit an interesting chord…..
Morgan, I agree with you and had not intended to downplay the importance of a well written proposal. Being on numerous panels and reviewing hundred of grant applications, I have always understood the importance of the first page of the proposal (aims and hypotheses). I just wanted to point out that there are many factors at play when it comes to the funding outcomes- I have seen some very ordinary applications get up and many great ones miss out in our peer review system down-under. We used to have a fairly good national peer review system, but it has been slowly dismantled by the bureaucracy that runs our granting system to appease to some specific interest groups with dodgy credentials. They seem to have a policy which, IMHO, can be best described as “the homogenization of scientific effort” in Australia. Now, I better get back to writing my proposal and hope my name comes up in this years grants lottery!
I am an independent researcher with an undergrad degree in biology, currently looking for funding to begin work on a new allergen detection kit. But I feel as though the odds are against me. I have been looking into the grant application process, and was wondering- What are the odds of actually receiving funding in the U.S. (I am not associated with any kind of research institution).
Is it entirely unheard of for someone in my position to actually receive a grant? I notice some of you have done grant reviews, have you seen applications like what I am suggesting?
I have a specific grant in mind already, with a few months before a letter of intent is due. I do have a plan for how the money will be spent, and my research aims are well grounded.
Any comments or direction would be appreciated.