Tag Archives: Sub-project

Catalogue

The posts discuss 8 themes:-

  1. How to write a Grant Application
  2. Strategy for writing grant applications
  3. Writing Style for Grant Applications
  4. Giving and Receiving Feedback on Grant Applications
  5. Dealing with referees reports and with rejection
  6. Interviews and Talks
  7. Software
  8. Academic Life and Afterlife

How to Write a Grant Application

Strategy for Grant Applications

Writing Style for Grant Applications

Friendly fire: Giving and receiving feedback

Dealing with referees reports and with rejection

Interviews and talks

Software for Writing Grant Applications

Academic life & Afterlife

Dealing with rejection 2: Salvage.

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Salvage is the only way forward after rejection.

The most difficult aspect of grant rejection, apart from not having a grant of course, is that your motivation to write new applications evaporates. That’s why it’s even more important than working out what was wrong with your rejected application to salvage what you can from the rejected application and start putting together a new one.

It is of course important to take the opportunity to learn what you can about what was wrong with the rejected application and I wrote about how to do that last week. However, whether or not you learn anything from it, you must come to terms with the fact that your rejected application is dead. Yes, dead. I’m sorry, I did say dead and I do mean dead. Mourn its passing but do not imagine that editing will reanimate its corpse. Use your editing pencil instead to mark useful parts to salvage and recycle.

 Salvage the Sub-Projects One at a Time

The most important part of the case for support is the description of the project. This should be at least half the case for support and it should be subdivided into three or four sub-projects. If it isn’t subdivided into projects then you can divide it up as you salvage it.

A sub-project is a discrete set of research activities designed to produce a definable outcome. You must divide your project into sub-projects in order to make it accessible for the grants committee. Remember, they are not experts in your field so they are unlikely to appreciate your project unless you can break it into bite-sized chunks.

If you cannot easily divide your research into sub-projects you can use the timeline of your project to divide it into phases. You will need to be able to say in a single sentence what you expect to be the outcome of each phase. If it’s impossible to do this you need to think again. You won’t get funding for a research project unless you can produce a succinct statement about what you expect to have happened by the time you are about a third of the way through it.   Of course you can use natural break-points in your project to divide it into phases that are not exactly equal, but if you want to get funded you must be able to give confidence that you will are able to plan the progress of your research.

Record Key Information About Each Sub-Project

To make it easy to re-use the sub-projects you need to record extra information with them. I suggested in a previous post that you should compile a catalogue of sub-projects with this information.

  • The most important thing to record is what the outcome would be if you were to carry out the sub-project. You should use this to draft a key sentence that describes the sub-project and states the outcome, unless you have already written such a sentence.
  • A list of the research activities that comprise the sub-project.
  • A list of the skills needed to carry out the sub-project.
  • A list of the resources needed to carry out the activities in the sub-project. This consists of 2 sub-lists:-
    • resources already available to you, and
    • resources you need the grant to pay for.

If you can salvage all of your sub-projects you should have about half what you need for another grant application. However I strongly recommend that you try to create a portfolio of sub-projects so that you can re-use them in different combinations.

 Useful Sentences and Phrases

The descriptions of the sub-projects are the only large chunks of text that I would advise you to salvage from the proposal. The other sub-sections will probably not be relevant if you restructure your project, which I strongly advise you to do. However, there are some snippets of text that could be worth salvaging from the rejected proposal.

  • Key sentences, other than those in the sections of text you have salvaged, are probably not worth salvaging. The ones that express the need to do the sub-projects you have salvaged will be useful but they are very easy to write. Any others should be viewed with suspicion because they have failed.
  • Sentences that refer to your research and project management skills and those of your team are quite difficult to write and should be salvaged if they read well. If your project is for BBSRC, NERC, MRC or EPSRC there will be whole sections of text describing the accomplishments of the different members of the project team that should be salvageable.
  • Descriptions of how existing resources will be used should also be salvaged, even when they are part of  sub-projects that you may not re-use.

Finally, a word of caution, be suspicious of all the text you are salvaging. Something in your grant application sank it and, unless your feedback made it very clear what it was, you should be cautious about the possibility of salvaging something that could sink the next one.

How to Deal with Rejection 1: What could I have done better?

Are you driven by the question or by the project?

Did you design a project that will answer your question? Thanks to Nick Kim, http://lab-initio.com

Getting a grant application rejected has three things in common with other rejections.

  1. Rejection is slightly less painful if you have other applications still being considered.
  2. Regardless of how painful it is, rejection is an important learning opportunity.
  3. Regardless of the pain and the learning, you need to make sensible decisions about whether, and how, to try again.

I know – believe me I really know – that getting grant applications rejected is painful. In my experience the combination of pain and humiliation can make it impossible to think analytically about the application for weeks or months. However, unless your desire to do research is completely extinguished, sooner or later you have to come back. When you do, it’s really important to learn as much as you can from the rejection and use it to plan the best way ahead.

If you are still consumed with the pain of rejection, you might want to bookmark this page and come back when you feel able to be analytical. However there are three practical  reasons you might want to work through the pain and deal analytically with the rejection now.

  • Dealing constructively with a rejection helps to draw a line under it and resolve the pain.
  • The sooner you start, the better will be the outcome for two reasons.
    • You will do a better job on the analysis if you do it while your memory is fresh.
    • Any plans you develop as a result of the analysis are more likely to be successful if you can implement them before they go out of date.
  • The more times you deal with rejection, the easier and the quicker it gets. I can remember once  (admittedly it was about my 20th rejection) I was able to deal with it in less than a day, rewrite the grant in under 3 weeks and get it fully funded.

If you have got this far I am assuming you want to be analytical. There are four separate steps.

  1. Work out why your grant application was rejected.
  2. Work out how you could have made it stronger.
  3. Salvage useful components.
  4. Get back on the horse.

I’ll deal with the first two in this post and the other two next week.

Work out why it was rejected

Usually the reviews you get back will  say lots of good things and it can be hard to understand why an application with so much going for it could have been rejected. Rejections usually boil down to:-

  • the committee thought the research question wasn’t important enough or
  • the committee couldn’t see how the project would answer the question.

There are three things you should consider here.

  1. It only takes one hole to sink an otherwise perfect boat. It might make it easier to find the hole if you filter out the negative comments and look at them separately.
  2. In most cases the committee discussion is more important than the referees reports but the description of their discussion is likely to be both short and vague. So the hole in the boat my not be very well defined.
  3. Funding rates are falling and sometimes perfect grants, grants that propose well-designed projects that will answer important questions, don’t get funded because there just isn’t enough money.

Don’t be too eager to assume that your grant was perfect. If the funding rate was 30% or better then it’s very unlikely. In fact, most grants that get funded could be improved significantly.

Work out how you could have made it stronger

Regardless of why your grant application was rejected, you should look to see whether it could have been improved. This is particularly important if the reason for rejection is not apparent from the comments: a badly written grant simply fails to convince the reader – the reader may not know why.

You should look separately at four elements:- the description of the project, the background, the introduction, and the summary. As a rough guide you should be clear on the following questions:-

Description of the project

  • Is it clear what you will do?
  • Have you explained the steps that will take you from starting research to having a set of findings that are written up and disseminated?
  • Is the project divided into three or four (i.e. more than two and fewer than five) phases?
  • Is it clear what will be discovered by each phase of the project?

Background to the Project

  • Have you given a good reason why you should do your project? Have you linked it to an important question?
  • Is your link direct (your project will completely anser the question) or indirect (your project will take some important steps towards an answer to the question)?
  • Has the funder stated explicitly or implicitly that this question is important? This is probably worth a whole post. I’ll get around to it.
  • Have you linked the question clearly to each phase of your project by showing that we need to know what each phase of the project will discover?
  • Do other authors agree with your specific ‘we need to know’ statements or are they individual to you?
  • Have you cited publications that demonstrate that your team are competent to produce new discoveries in this area?
  • Have you overstated your contribution to the field?
  • Could other people think this area is a backwater rather than a niche?

 Introduction

  • Does the introduction make all the statements listed in the ‘key sentences‘?
  • Does the introduction state every thing that  ‘we need to know’.
  • Does the introduction state  every thing that the project will discover?
  • Are these statements in the introduction clearly the same as the statements that begin the corresponding sub-sections of the background and the description of the project? They should be recognisably the same statements although they don’t have to be exact copies.

Summary (I mean the summary of the Grant Application)

The summaries of most successful grant applications are appallingly bad. You can see this if you look for the details of successful proposals from the UK research councils or from the European Research Council. However, a good summary helps the funding agency to choose more appropriate referees and it helps the referees and the committee members to understand the research. You should check the following:-

  • Does the summary make all the statements listed in the ‘key sentences‘?
  • Does the summary state every thing that  ‘we need to know’.
  • Does the summary state  every thing that the project will discover?
  • Are these statements in the summary clearly the same as those in the introduction? They should be recognisably stating the same thing although they don’t have to be exact copies.

What Next?

It’s very likely that these two exercises will give you a clearer sense of how you could have given your application a better chance. Next week I will discuss what raw material you can take from a rejected grant application and how to turn it into the basis of future success.

Is your grant application a misshapen monster?

Nuke_fishWhat do you do when your grant application (or your colleague’s) turns out to be a misshapen monster? How do you even know if it has? Can you tell if it’s just a little bit deformed? Read on. This post is about how to test whether your case for support is the right size and shape. Size and shape go together for three reasons.

  • If your grant is a monster then it’s probably misshapen too.
  • Even if it’s a perfectly formed monster, you will need to cut lumps out of it to get it down to size, so you need to check that the cutting doesn’t destroy the shape.
  • If it’s the right size but the wrong shape then you will probably need to cut some parts and grow others.

Incidentally, if you think that the solution to an overlong case for support is to shrink the margins and the font size I have no argument with you. None whatsoever. But you are reading the wrong blog. This blog is about grant-writing. Here are some blogs about typography.

Gross malformations: missing parts

The easiest malformation to spot is if one of the parts of the case for support is missing or the wrong size. In the research funding toolkit book we make the point that a generic case for support has three components.

  • An introduction that very quickly states the main objective of the project, why it is important, the aims, the objectives, and what will be done with the results. This should be less than 20% of the total. The commonest mistake is to omit it completely. Less commonly it is so big that it unbalances the case for support.
  • A background section that makes the reader feel that it is important to do the research in the project by showing how the aims contribute to a big important question. This part should be no more than than 30% of the total. It’s fairly common for it to be hypertrophied – and hideously deformed by philosophical quotations, particularly when people start by writing about the question they want to answer rather than describing the project that they want to do. I have seen a case for support that was 90% background.
  • The description of the research project, which describes the research in sufficient detail to convince the reader that the aims will be met. This should be at least 50% of the case for support. It is often too short and sketchy. It is rare for it to be too long except when the project itself is over ambitious.

Lesser malformations: malformed parts

The parts of the case for support must be the right shape as well as the right size if they are to work effectively. There are two major aspects to this.

  • The background must match the project. Each component of the project (there should be three or four such sub-projects) should have a corresponding sub-section of the background that makes the case that the outcome of that sub-project will meet one of the specific aims of the project. These sub-sections should be in the same order as their corresponding sub-sections in the description of the project and they should be preceded by one or two  sub-sections that explain the importance of the overall objective of the project and link it to the specific aims.
  • The statements in the introduction should be in the same order as the subsections of the background and description of the project to which they correspond. The introduction sketches a picture of the case for support and the other two sections fill in the detail.

The Zombie Grant

If you have generated your draft without thinking too much about structure and particularly if, like most academics, you tend to write statements as conclusions, rather than as assertions to be explained and justified, it may actually be pretty hard to work out what each section of the text does. If you are in this situation your draft is the research grant equivalent of what Inger Mewburn, Director of Research Training at the Australian National University  (AKA @thesiswhisperer), calls the zombie thesis. Let’s call it a zombie grant.

I have explained that you can avoid writing a zombie grant by writing key sentences and using them to impose structure on your draft.  But once you have it, you need to take drastic action to avoid getting sucked into a quagmire. As @thesiswhisperer says says “The worst thing to do with a Zombie Thesis is to do a line by line edit. This is like trying to fight a jungle war – you will find yourself hip deep in mud somewhere, with a sucking chest wound, too far for a helicopter to reach.”

To revive a zombie thesis @thesiswhisperer recommends a rebuilding process based on reverse outlining, which is explained in this blog post. To revive a zombie grant you need a combination of reverse outlining and retro-fitting key sentences which I will explain next week.

Aims and Objectives, why the world needs your research.

the-mountainAims and objectives provide an excellent framework for the case for support in a research grant application.

A well-written case for support states an overarching aim based on a big research question. It shows how this big question gives rise to three or four smaller questions and then describes a research project that will answer those questions. The compelling logic for the reader is that the project deserves to be funded because it has been intricately designed to answer the big question. The truth may be that the intricacy lies more in the writing than in the project’s design. Matching sets of aims and objectives can be crafted to link a pre-designed project to a pre-existing big question.

Before we consider how to do this, let’s be absolutely clear about the difference between aims and objectives. There’s an excellent discussion of the difference in the context of a PhD project,  by Pat Thomson. She defines the aim as “…what you want to know…” and the objectives as “…the specific steps you will take to achieve your aim..”  This definition works perfectly for our purposes.

We can apply this distinction more or less directly in a grant application as follows.

  • Aims are the knowledge and understanding that you need in order to answer your research question. Well-designed aims create clear links between your research project and the big, important question that motivates it.
  •  Objectives are specific research actions that you plan to carry out in your research project. The objectives define the structure of the research project.  This means that if you design your project carefully, it will be clear that your research objectives will fulfil the aims defined by your research question.

The easy way to link up the aims and objectives is to start by describing the research that you want to do and what it will find out. You should divide your research project into (or assemble it from)  three or four sub-projects. Each sub-project will lead to a clear discovery or outcome. Each  outcome generates an exactly corresponding aim. If you want to do a sub-project that will discover how neurones in the cerebral cortex respond to lights of different colours, you have to have the aim “We need to know how neurones in  the cerebral cortex respond to lights of different colours”. Working backwards from the objectives in this way means that aims and objectives match perfectly. No skill is required

The place where skill is required is in tying together the three or four aims and making the case that meeting each of them will make a significant contribution to solving a larger research problem that is important to your target funder. That is where the real skill of writing grant applications lies.

For completeness, in addition to this set of three or four aims with precisely matching objectives, I would recommend another four sentences which are a more complex mix of aim and objective and which would be used to set the context in any full statement of the aims and objectives. So a full statement of the aims and objectives would be as follows.

  • The first sentence, which would be the first sentence of the case for support, would be a one sentence summary of the whole proposal. It would state the overall aim of the project, which is to take us closer to solving the larger research problem, and the overall objective, which is to carry out the research project. This is a very difficult sentence to write but a very important one, for two reasons. First, it gets the reader excited about the project by telling them its aim and its objective. Second, because it tells everything in a single sentence, it can afford to gloss over uncertainties, helping the reader to form a positive view of the project.
  • Second, there is a sentence that states why the research problem is important and which may also introduce the specific aims.
  • Immediately after this sentence you would state the three or four specific aims.
  • Third, after stating the specific aims, you need to set the scene for stating the specific objectives with an introductory sentence that describes the nature of the research project.
  • The three or four specific objectives, stating research outcomes that exactly match the specific aims, would be stated immediately after it.
  • After the objectives, there should be a sentence that says what will be done with the research outcomes. In a sense this is an overall objective which should ensure that the overall outcome of the research project  contributes to solving the larger research problem that motivates the entire project.

Finally I should make it clear that, although it matters for understanding this post, for the purpose of grant-writing,  it doesn’t matter that some authorities, including the Oxford dictionary, do not distinguish between aims and objectives in exactly the same way as I do. What matters in a grant application is how you present the argument that links your project to the important question. Whether you call any individual link an aim or an objective is neither here nor there.


					

Put some meat in your feedback sandwich

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Make sure that your feedback sandwich has plenty of meat.

This is one of a series of posts with advice for people who review grant applications for their friends and colleagues. It is also intended to encourage people writing grant applications to review what you have written before you ask a colleague to read it and tell you something you could have worked out for yourself. My last post argued that a quick and easy way of reviewing a grant application is to check its structure. Good structure makes a grant application easy to read.

Most applications will have very poor structure. If the structure is poor, it is not worth reviewing the detailed content. One reason is that it will take too long. Another is that, even if the content is very good, a funding committee’s enthusiasm for the application will be limited because the poor structure makes it difficult to understand.

At this point I feel honour-bound to confess that I have hesitated a couple of weeks before finishing this post because I know that many people find my feedback a bit too direct. They like to soften criticism by constructing a feedback sandwich that smothers useful comments in copious quantities of praise. My view is that feedback should be clear, it should explain how the proposal can be improved, and it should be delivered as quickly as possible. Feel free to cut and paste from what follows and to wrap it up in whatever form suits you.

The application should have an introduction that states clearly:-

  • what goal the project will achieve;
  • why the goal is important;
  • about three aims, which are things that we need to discover or understand in order to achieve the goal;
  • the general research approach;
  • about three research objectives, which are pieces of research that will enable us to achieve the aims; and
  • what will be done with the results.

These statements are what I call the ‘Key Sentences’. They are a distillation of the argument that the project deserves funding. If the grants committee believe the key sentences, they will almost certainly award a grant. So the rest of the case for support should be designed to make the reader believe the key sentences. It does this by repeating them, and reinforcing them with evidence or explanation.

After the introduction, the case for support has two main sections, each of which repeats six of the key sentences and then justifies or explains them. The background section deals with the goal, the importance and the aims. It should explain, with evidence, why the goal is important and how meeting the aims will achieve the goal. The description of the research project deals with all the rest. It should explain in detail the research approach, the research objectives, and what will be done with the results.

The structure allows a reader to understand the message of the grant in 2 or 3 minutes, by ‘speed-reading’ it. This is very important. The committee that decides whether or not to award the grant will have dozens of other applications to read and discuss. Most members will have a limited understanding of the detailed argument. Some of them will still be reading the application during the final discussion about whether to fund it. All of them will have a say in whether it gets funded. They will be much more enthusiastic to fund an application that they can understand and remember.

The structure also helps the referees who will read the proposal thoroughly and write an evaluation. Each key sentence leads directly to the detailed argument and evidence that justifies and explains it. It is not quite as important to make referees’ task easy because each referee typically only deals with a small number of proposals. Moreover, their enthusiasm will be based on their evaluation of the detailed argument. But it definitely doesn’t hurt to make their task easy.

Opening sentence

The opening sentence must whet the reader’s appetite. The best way to do that is to say what the project will achieve, together with something about how it will achieve it, ideally with a clear implication that the research team are well qualified to do the work. For example, the sentence “This project will develop a new potential treatment for stroke based on a family of synthetic metabolic inhibitors that we have discovered, and synthesised” achieves all this. The reference to discovery and synthesis suggests that the project is a continuation of past work. Of course the suggestion that the project continues previous work does not testify to its importance – that will rest on the opening clause, which states that the project will develop a new potential treatment for stroke.

Draft grant applications quite often have a good opening sentence. But it is not usually at the beginning. Usually it is somewhere towards the middle. Skim through the whole case for support to see if there is a suitable opening sentence that can be moved to the opening position.

It is useful to repeat the opening sentence at the start of the background section, which usually follows after the introduction. It is also useful to open the summary with the same sentence. Repetition of this kind is very good: it helps the reader to remember the essential message. Unfortunately most academics don’t like to repeat a message unless they can confuse readers by using completely different words.

Importance sentence

It’s useful to have a sentence explaining that what the project will achieve is important and to have it follow the opening sentence, which says what the project will achieve. Health, social, or economic benefits are usually, depending on the remit of the funder, good reasons that something is important. Solving a major theoretical problem may also be a good reason. Being the next logical step from the applicant’s previous research is typically not a reason for importance, although mentioning this kind of progression can be a useful way of supporting the proposition that the applicant has the necessary skills to carry out the research.

The importance sentence should also be repeated in the background section and in the summary.

Aims

The aims of the project should be stated immediately after the importance sentence. If you don’t know the difference between aims and objectives (surprisingly, the Oxford Dictionary is rather little help: its definition of ‘objective’  is ‘thing aimed at’), read this excellent post on Pat Thomson’s blog.

I suggest that there should be about four aims. I also think that because funding agencies often ask you to state aims and objectives, you should use them as key parts of the structure. A good way to state an aim is to say that “We need to know” something. There are three important things to check about each stated aim.

The aim should be restated, word for word, in the background section, where it should be followed by a few paragraphs that convince the reader that this is an important aim. Usually they do this by citing appropriate literature. Stating and justifying the aims like this is a device to create a direct link between what the project will do, and an important underlying question that the funder will pay to have answered. It’s also a way of papering over the cracks when the link is a bit tenuous.

The aims of the project should also be stated in the summary. Repeating them exactly, using the same sentences, is a good way of helping the reader to remember them.

Project overview sentence

It is useful to have a sentence that says what kind of research project is envisaged and what the likely outcome will be. It’s often necessary to have something that puts the reader in the right frame of mind for the subproject overview sentences. This sentence should be in the introduction and should be repeated at the start of the section of the proposal that describes the research project in detail.

Sub-project overview sentences (Objectives)

The essential difference between aims and objectives is that, aims tend to be abstract and objectives tend to be concrete. Aims are things that we would like to achieve. Objectives are the concrete things that we will do in order to achieve those aims. Thus the four or so sub-projects that comprise a research project are objectives. Matching the objectives to the aims is a good way of convincing the reader that the research needs to be done: the description of each sub-project should begin with a sentence that includes the phrase “this will tell us” whatever the corresponding aim says “we need to know”.

These sentences should be ‘pre used’ in the introduction and in the summary.

Dissemination

The last substantive sentence in the introduction should say something about what will be done with the results. Again, this sentence should be re-used to introduce the last sub-section of the description of the research project, which should explain it in detail.

So, that’s the filling for the feedback sandwich. How do you wrap it up? I think that it’s up to you to use your judgement. All the wrapping does is to set a baseline. In my view it doesn’t much matter where the baseline is, as long as it is absolutely clear how much the structure of the case for support could be improved.

I should point out that some funders, including several UK Research Councils, require applications to contain a section detailing the achievements of the research team.  That section, which is an excellent way of supporting the competence proposition, is in addition to those discussed in this post.

Review a Research Grant Application in Five Minutes

PeerReviewCartoon

Cartoon by Nick D Kim, http://strange-matter.net

This post tells you how to do a five-minute review of a research grant application. If you are asked to comment on a grant application by a friend or colleague, you should begin with this five minute review. In 95% of cases it will be all you need to do. Except create the feedback sandwich of course.

If you are writing a grant application, before you ask anybody else to read it you should spend five minutes reviewing it yourself. Far too many of the grant applications that I get asked to read take me a lot less than five minutes to review. Then it takes several days to construct a palatable feedback sandwich with the filling  “rewrite this completely”.

I don’t say you can review the detailed content of a grant application in five minutes. That takes longer and I will write about how to do it quickly in a future post. However, five minutes is plenty of time to review the framework of the case for support and check that it is appropriately used.

The framework is important for two reasons. First, if it is good, it tells the reader the essential story of your grant application very quickly. Remember, most readers only want to know the essential story. Second, the framework guides the reader to the detailed content that supports and justifies the essential story, so that the detail can be reviewed effectively and quickly.

‘Summary Sentence’

The most important part of the framework is a summary sentence. This should say what the project will achieve and enough about how it will achieve it to give a bit of distinctiveness and a bit of plausibility. It is essentially the elevator pitch, except that instead of taking 30 seconds to 2 minutes to say it or read it, it should take more like 15 seconds. The summary sentence should be the first sentence of the introduction, so it should take no time to find it, you still have 4 minutes 45 seconds left.

If you read my last post you will recognise that the summary sentence is what I refer to there as the first key sentence. So it will come as no surprise that you should check that the summary sentence is re-used as the first sentence of the part of the case for support that sets out the background to the research project. Let’s allow 15 seconds to do that. 4 minutes 30 seconds left.

‘Importance Sentence’

Now you should spend 20 seconds checking the second sentence of the introduction. It’s the importance sentence. It should say something about why it is important to achieve whatever the project will achieve. Make a mental note about whether the importance sentence has a practical element. Does it mention a real world problem – childhood cancer, the economy, forgetfulness in old-age, or some such. It’s not essential that there is a practical element to the importance sentence but it has implications for the dissemination sentence, which you will review in a few minutes time.

As soon as you have checked the importance sentence for practical content, jump to the background section and check that the importance sentence is repeated there. This is just a quick glance, so it should only take you 10 seconds. You have 4 minutes left.

‘Aims Sentences’

Go back to the introduction. Immediately after the importance sentence there should be a set of aims sentences, about four sentences setting out the aims of the project. The aims sentences should state things that we need to know, understand, characterise or in some way discover. The aims sentences could be preceded by a linking or framing sentence and they could easily be formatted as bullet points. Checking that the aims sentences are in the right place should take you 10 seconds. Do not look at the content of the aims sentences yet. Wait 30 seconds until we get to the sub-project overview sentences.

Now you should check the next sentence of the introduction. It should be the ‘project overview sentence’.

Project overview Sentence.

The project overview sentence gives a simple one-sentence overview of the project. It might also be structured as a linking sentence to the four or so sub-project overview sentences, which should immediately follow it and which could appear as bullet points and could be expressed as objectives. It should take you 30 seconds to read the project overview sentence and 20 more to check that it appears again to introduce the part of the case for support that gives the detailed description of the research methods and of the project.

Next you can spend 10 seconds checking that the sub-project overview sentences follow the project overview sentence. Now you are ready to check their content against the content of the corresponding aims sentences.

Sub-project overview sentences; content of aims sentences

Each aims sentence should link logically to the corresponding sub-project overview sentence in the following way. The aims sentence should say “We need to know X”. The sub-project overview sentence should give a very brief description of the research in the sub-project and should end with a clause that says “this will tell us X“.

The aims sentences should be repeated in the background. Each of them should introduce a discussion of the evidence that supports the assertion that this is an important aim.

The sub-project overview sentences should be repeated in the part of the case for support that describes the project in detail. Each of them should introduce the detailed description of the corresponding sub-project.

This checking and matching will probably take nearly a minute to do for the first aim/sub-project overview sentence pair but the others should be much quicker. It’s just a matching exercise after all. Lets assume it takes 2 minutes. You have a minute left, and only the dissemination sentence to check.

The dissemination sentence

The last sentence of the introduction should say what will be done with the results. It is the dissemination sentence. You need to check that it is repeated in the description of the project as the introduction to a section on dissemination. You also need to check that, if the importance sentence has a practical component then the dissemination must have a corresponding practical element. For example, if the project is going to discover a cure for a disease, the dissemination needs to promote the use of the cure in some way. As a general rule there must be a plan to disseminate the results in a way that makes it likely that the claimed practical benefit will be realised.

What to do with the outcome of the review

Only about 5% of grant applications will pass this five minute review. If you are reviewing a grant application for someone else and it passes, it should be pretty easy to review the detailed content. I’ll give some helpful pointers in a future post. It goes without saying that if the grant you are reviewing is yours, it is safe to give it to someone to review.

In the more likely case that the grant application fails the review, then it needs rewriting. If it’s yours, that’s pretty simple. Read my post from last week. Write the 10 key sentences and use them to organise the text you have already written. If you can’t write the 10 key sentences then you shouldn’t be writing a research grant.

If the grant application is not yours, you need to write a feedback sandwich. Basically the grant needs to be rewritten before it’s worth looking at the detailed content. I’ll say something about how to do this in my next post but whatever you do don’t use the phrase “completely rewrite”.

Get the Framework in Place – Quickly

Framework

In this post I want to describe the framework of a grant application. Its components are the key sentences in the case for support that define its essential message. I will explain what the sentences are and how you use them to build the framework. Then I want to explain how you can draft the sentences very very quickly.

The essential message of a grant application’s case for support is carried in ten key sentences, which make the case in headlines. The rest of the document fleshes out that case, provides evidence and makes it believable. But the key sentences set out what has to be believed. They say what the research project will achieve, why it is important, how it will achieve its goal and what you will do with the results. That is the sense in which they carry the essential message.

So what are the 10 key sentences?

Sentence 1 is very important. Its function is to make the reader want to read on by giving them a sense of what your research project will achieve. A good way to do this is to state the overall outcome of the project and to specify enough detail about the project to make it seem both feasible and distinctive. For example, the sentence “This project will develop a new potential treatment for stroke based on a family of synthetic metabolic inhibitors that our group has discovered, tested and synthesised” does all this. Like many introductory sentences, it is quite long. The length is due to extra information that makes it clear both what the approach is and that the project is building on previous work by the applicants. The project would have seemed less feasible and less distinctive if the sentence had stopped at the word “stroke“.

Sentence 2 should give evidence that the problem to be solved is important. A good sentence 2 (assuming it’s true) would be “There are 152000 strokes per year  and over 600,000 disabled stroke survivors in the UK: a suitable metabolic inhibitor could reduce the disability caused by stroke.” It is a common mistake to say something like this in the first sentence but it does not engage the reader so effectively as a promise that the project will bring us closer to solving the problem.

Sentences 3-5 state that we need the outcomes of the research project. In order to make it easy to explain your project it is best to break it into 3 sub-projects, each of which will have a clear outcome. Before you describe the project, sentences 3-5 sell the project to the reader by stating  that each of the outcomes is important. Each of the sentences can be a simple statement that “We need to know” whatever the sub-project will discover.

Sentence 6 introduces the research project. It is an introductory sentence and it can help to add some complexity to make the project seem more feasible and more distinctive. For example, the hypothetical stroke project would be helped by some reference to the achievements of the research team or to the distinctive facilities available.

Sentences 7-9 describe each of the sub-projects. Each sentence says what the sub-project consists of and what its outcome will be. It is crucial that the outcomes match exactly the outcomes sentences 3-5 said were important.

Sentence 10 says something about what will be done with the outcomes to maximise the benefit that will accrue from the project.

Where do the key sentences appear?

Each of the key sentences should be used three times. First they appear consecutively in the introduction of the case for support. The introduction may also include some linking statements but no other substantive messages.

The sentences appear again in the main body of the case for support. This time each sentence introduces a significant section of text that fleshes out and justifies its message.

Third, the summary of the project should be virtually an exact copy of the introduction to the case for support.

How do you write the key sentences quickly?

As I will explain below, it should be possible to produce first drafts of the key sentences in less than an hour. I recommend that you use the draft key sentences as a framework for writing the two main sections of the case for support, the background and the description of the research project.

The first sentences to write are sentences 7-9. Each one states what research you will do in one of your sub-projects and what the outcome of that research will be. Usually the outcome will be that you will know something or understand something that currently is not known or understood. For example, if you were carrying out a project on the importance of writing in the practice of social work, sentence 7 might be:-

We will analyse and quantify texts and explore how writing is being managed alongside other commitments in order to discover the institutional writing demands of contemporary social work.

If you have worked out what your project will consist of and why it is worth doing then it should be really easy to write sentences 7-9. And if you haven’t, you shouldn’t be writing, you should be designing your project.

As soon as you have written sentences 7-9 you need to write sentences 3-5. Each of these sentences has to state the reason that the outcome of one of your sub-projects is important. It should use exactly the same wording to describe that outcome as its corresponding sentence 7-9. So the sentence 3 corresponding to the sentence 7 above could say something like:-

We need to know the institutional writing demands of contemporary social work so that we can identify the writing skills that social workers need.

Notice that the description of what the sub-project will discover appears in exactly the same words in both sentences.

Sentence 6 should also be fairly easy. It is a descriptive sentence that summarises the main features of the research project. These features are itemised in the first clauses of each of the sentences 7-9. You simply need an overarching summary. It should only take you a couple of minutes.

If you haven’t thought hard about dissemination it will be impossible to draft the definitive version of sentence 10 at this stage. However, you should force yourself to write something quickly now. What you write may be rather unconvincing at this stage, but the effort of writing it will be a stimulus for you to think about that phase of the project as you flesh out the case for support. Don’t spend more than 5 minutes on it at this stage.

Now it is time for sentence 1. This is the hardest sentence to write and it’s nearly impossible if you try to write it too soon. It should be pretty easy now because you have written sentences 3-10. The ideal form of sentence 1 is that it states a big question to which all of your sub-projects contribute. It then adds some detail about how you will do the project. This detail should be drawn from sentence 6. With the preparation you have done, sentence 1 should take no more than 10 minutes.

Don’t worry that your sub-projects don’t answer the big question completely. They never do. The knack is to find a big question that fits loosely, but not too loosely, around your project. It has to be clear that your project will contribute to answering the big question you have chosen. It is accepted that there is a trade-off between how completely you answer the question and how big it is – everybody knows that it took more than one research project grant to find the Higgs particle.  You cope with the fact that your project will not answer your big question completely by choosing your words carefully. Notice that, in my sentence 1, I have been careful to use the term “potential treatment”. It would be implausible to claim that the project would develop an actual treatment.

Once you have a draft of sentence 1, sentence 2 should be very quick and easy to draft. All you need to do is to give a reason that your contribution to answering the big question is important.  This reason should be a fact about the world (the If drafting sentence 2 takes you more than a minute then you need to redraft sentence 1. Even with a redraft, you should have your framework well within the hour. If it takes you more than two hours, then you are not ready to write the grant. Find out how to get ready by reading this post.

Are you ready to start?

Starting Line Photo

Starting Line

In this post I will tell you how to decide whether you should start writing a grant application. In essence it’s about how to check whether you have a viable, fundable research project before you go to the trouble of writing the grant application.

This is the third in a series of posts prompted by a desire to show people the easiest possible way to write a research grant application really quickly. I also want to help people avoid wasting time by trying to write grant applications that are unlikely to be finished and virtually certain to be rejected.

In the first post in the series, I argued that you should not start writing until you are ready to write the description of your research project. For me this is a no-brainer. It’s not just that I have seen many people waste years writing flabby, no-hoper grant applications that carefully define a big question and fail to say how they will answer it. It’s more fundamental. The whole point of a grant application is that it is an attempt to sell a research project to a funding body. How can you start trying to sell something before you can say what it is?

In the second post in the series, I advised that a good way to make sure that you are always ready to write a research project at short notice, is to use a process that I call ‘outlining’ to maintain an outline, a catalogue of possible sub-projects. A sub-project is a discrete piece of research; three or four sub-projects make a nice, saleable research project.

I explained that the outline consists of five lists for each sub-project:-

  • a list of discoveries or outcomes, what each sub-project will achieve;
  • a list of the activities that will be carried out in order to make the discovery;
  • a list of the skills that will be needed to carry out the activities;
  • a list of the resources that will be needed to carry out the activities.
      • The resource list will be split into two sub-lists. The first will list the resources that will be paid for by the grant and the second will list those that will be, or have already been, paid for by the institution. It is often necessary to move items between these two sub-lists because funders have different rules about what resources they will pay for.

Whether or not you maintain a catalogue of sub-projects, you should prepare an outline of your proposed research project before you begin to write bout it. That is, you should compile the 5 lists of information for the three or four sub-projects in your proposed research project.

The advantage of using an outline is that it makes the task of writing and submitting a grant much more efficient. The outline contains the information you need for the three main tasks involved in writing and submitting a grant application.

  • It contains the information you need to check the viability of your proposed project, which is the subject of this post.
  • It contains the information you need to negotiate, and to calculate in detail,  the resourcing of the project.
  • It contains essential information that must be used in writing the project.

How to test your project before you start.

To check the viability of your project you should ask the questions below. All of these questions will be asked, either by the funder or by your institution, after your grant application is written. It will save time to ask them now and make sure that the answers are appropriate before you start writing. I have set out the questions in sections according to the list that has the information needed to answer them. The sections are in the order resources, activities, skills and discoveries.

Resources

  • Are all the resources being requested allowable under the chosen funding scheme?
    • If not, you have three choices. Find a different funder; find a different source of funds to pay for the ineligible resources; or change the sub-project for one that doesn’t need them.
    • Don’t make the mistake of assuming that an especially persuasive application will persuade the funder to bend the rules.
  • Will the resources to be provided by the institution definitely be available to the project?
    • Now is the time to check with your line manager or Head of Department.
    • Don’t forget to include your time if you have a salaried position.
    • Don’t forget the research and office space and equipment that will be needed for the research and the researchers.
  • Is the grant requested the right size?
    • This is not just a matter of whether it is within the stated limits of the funding scheme for which you are applying. It should be within the typical range both for the scheme and for an applicant of your standing. Your institution’s research office, or the funding body will usually be happy to give you good advice on this.
    • If your grant is the wrong size, do not make the mistake of trying to fix it by changing the resource list: change the whole project by scaling up or scaling down sub-projects until you have a project that is the right size.
  • Is the complete set of resources adequate to carry out all the activities of the project?
    • It is very common for grants to be rejected outright because of a mismatch.
    • Asking for too little is definitely worse than asking for too much but neither is good.

 Activities

  • Will the specified activities lead to the specified outcomes?
    • This is the heart and soul of the research proposal. You sell the project on the basis of the outcomes it will produce (see below). You will have to write a description of the project that will convince the reader that what you plan to do will do will produce the outcomes you claim. You will only be able to convince them if your description is comprehensive.
  • Can all the activities be done within the specified times?
    • It is a common and fatal mistake to promise far too much and to be vague about how it will get done. It is important to be realistic about what can be done by ordinary mortals in modest time-frames.
    •  And remember it is important to adjust the project rather than to make unrealistic promises about how long it will take.

Skills

  • Does the project team have all the skills?
    • The test that a grants’ committee will apply is whether the research team has peer-reviewed publications that demonstrate the use of the skills. If not, then you need to enhance your team or reduce your project. If you can’t do that, write papers, not a grant.
  • Are the skills sufficient to carry out the activities?
  • Do the skills justify the staff to be paid for by the grant?
    • If you want to hire a post-doc to do a project, it will need to be clear that advanced research skills are part of the project. 

Discoveries or Outcomes

  • Do we need to know that?
    • Are the research outcomes important enough to deserve funding? Funding agencies all have their own statements about their criteria for evaluating research outcomes. Typically they are  interested in discoveries that advance understanding in an important subject or field of study, or that will improve health or economic or social well-being. Although you don’t need chapter and verse at this stage you do need to be reasonably certain that your research will lead to new knowledge or understanding that will have an impact on your field or on society, or on both.
    • It is important that none of your sub-projects could possibly produce results that would render the other sub-projects pointless. For example a project that starts by isolating the bacterium responsible for a disease and then doing lots of experiments to understand the physiology of the bacterium and how the disease can be cured or prevented will fail at the first step if the bacterium cannot be isolated. Many projects fail to get funded because they appear to have this kind of dependency between the early and late phases.
    • Do not claim that your research will show everybody else is wrong, even if you think it will. It is better to put a positive spin on the current state of knowledge and explain how your work will advance it.

So what?

Of course all these questions can, and should, be asked by somebody reading your grant application after it is written. However, by asking the right questions before you start writing you make it easier to write a good grant application quickly. You also make it possible to begin the detailed work necessary to make sure that your research project is properly resourced and costed as soon as you start writing it, rather than after you have finished. Many grant applications have been compromised by the need to make hasty last-minute adjustments because of difficulties about resourcing that only became apparent after the writing was done.

Next week I will explain how, using the information in the outline of your research project, you should be able to sketch out your case for support in a couple of hours.

Be Prepared

3383951_sIn this post I want to tell you how you can be prepared to write a grant application quickly and with minimum effort. Last week I warned you about the trap of the never-ending grant application. This week I am telling you how you can make sure you never fall into it.

The essence of the approach is that you use a process that I call ‘outlining’ to compile a personal catalogue of possible research sub-projects. Each sub-project consists of a piece of research that you would like to do, but for which you don’t currently have the time or the resources. If you can create a suitable catalogue you will be able to design a viable research project very quickly. If you cannot create such a catalogue, you are not ready to write a grant application and you should not waste the time.

This approach is the easiest way to discover whether you are able to start writing the description of a research project. I will discuss how you create the basic building block of your research project, a sub-project, and how you create a catalogue of sub-projects.

The definition of a sub-project is very flexible and is very much up to you. We point out in the book, The Research Funding Toolkit, that a research project is much easier to write about if it can be broken down into about four components. These components are the sub-projects. So for the 2-3 year research project of a typical grant-application a sub-project will be about 6 plus or minus 2 months full-time research.

Sub-projects should be conceptually discrete but they might overlap in time and in resources. For example, imagine a psychology research project to test whether particular numerical and verbal skills develop at different rates in boys and girls. It might consist of a series of discrete sub-projects each of which measures a different set of numerical and verbal skills. Each sub-project can be defined in terms of what research will be done, what resources will be needed and what the sub-project will discover. However, the sub-projects might well be carried out during the same time period using the same equipment.

The point of the sub-project is that, when you are explaining a big research project, it is very helpful to break it down into a small number of discrete components, which together build up into a significant package. And when you are trying to design a significant research project, it is usually easier to build it up out of a number of sub-projects.

In compiling the kind of catalogue you need for writing research grants it is essential to record 5 sets of information about each sub-project. These are:-

  • What the sub-project will discover or establish. Ideally a sub-project will discover something that can be expressed in a single sentence. For example, one of the sub-projects in our hypothetical psychology project might establish whether ability to solve arithmetic problems is equally related with ability to write complex sentences in boys and girls.
  • What activities the sub-project consists of. For example, our hypothetical sub-project might involve the design of testing materials; the development of suitable testing apparatus; the selection of a suitable group of schools to be involved in the project; liaison with the schools; selection and screening of suitable children within each school; administration of the tests; processing of test results; writing of reports and papers.
  • What skills are needed to carry out the activities.
  • What resources will be used in the sub-project. This should be separated into two lists, resources that are already available and new resources that must be paid for by the grant. These lists should go beyond the obvious resources of equipment and consumables and include things like your time and the time of other staff who would be involved, which should be quantified both because some funders will treat it as a cost that can be funded from the grant and because your employer may need to know what they are committing to the project. They should also include facilities that may be needed like laboratories. In our hypothetical sub-project on child development it could also include the relationships which you will have established with schools that provide you with research participants – if you have them, otherwise you will need to budget for the work that must be done to build such relationships.

These 5 lists are what I call the ‘outline’. They include all the information you will need about a sub-project in order to write about it as part of a research grant. I strongly recommend that you develop the habit of turning your ideas about possible research projects into a catalogue of sub-projects. The essence of the outline is that you maintain the 5 lists for each sub-project. As soon as you have a few sub-projects you can consider whether you have enough to generate a coherent and fundable research project. I will tell you how to make that decision in my next post.