Resource of the Week #9: An Annotated Grant Proposal

Hello again! Greetings from Rwanda, where an AuthorAID workshop just ended. The workshop was on writing proposals. I was the facilitator, and Ravi Murugesan (the AuthorAID training coordinator) was the co-facilitator.

I think this workshop was the first AuthorAID workshop entirely on writing proposals. After returning home, I’ll add the presentations to the AuthorAID Resource Library.

During part of the workshop, we looked at examples of successful grant proposals. One example, which already was in the AuthorAID Resource Library, is a research proposal funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Although NIH proposals now have a somewhat different format, this proposal remains an excellent learning tool—in part because it is annotated (has comments written on it). Many of the comments identify items that researchers also should do (or consider doing) when writing proposals for funders other than NIH.

Among these items are the following:

• following instructions about length
• using relatively short sentences, for easy reading
• guiding readers by using boldface, italics, indentation, numbering, etc
• using graphs, photos, or other figures to illustrate points
• stating reasons that methods were chosen
• citing references appropriately

I encourage you to look at this proposal (or at least the comments).

Until the next post— Barbara