A Tiger of a Grant Proposal

Greetings again. As I prepare this blog post, AuthorAID users from China and some other Asian countries are celebrating the beginning of the Year of the Tiger. Happy lunar new year to you all!

This week I showed some students a grant proposal that seems as powerful as a tiger. Let me tell you the story:

Recently 2 graduate students who had taken my science-editing course said they wanted to learn more about editing grant proposals. Therefore I’m giving these students a little course on the subject.

In this course, we recently looked at an excellent resource from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). This resource is a grant application (grant proposal) with notes written on it. The notes identify some strengths of the grant application.

Among these strengths are the following:

• excellent organization
• use of boldface to indicate very important points
• use of numbering to make lists easy to follow
• inclusion of graphs and other figures to help present information
• presentation of reasons, for example for methods chosen
• use of references to support points
• readable wording (for example, avoidance of very long sentences)

NIH recently revised its instructions for grant application. Thus, for example, NIH grant applications now are shorter.

However, the principles of writing good proposals remain the same, both for NIH and for other sources of funding. And so this annotated grant proposal remains a valuable resource.

Wishing everyone a good Year of the Tiger! —Barbara