grant writing tips from faculty reviewers

As a grant writing coach, I had the opportunity to sit in on many specific aim faculty reviews last year. Before starting each review, I asked the faculty reviewers to share one critical piece of advice for grant writers. Here were their responses.

In regards to writing style

Simplify your writing! Every sentence should reflect a single thought.
Proofread everything and then proofread again.
Minimize abbreviations. If you have to have abbreviations consider making a table of commonly used abbreviations or simplify concepts into clear terms (example: “XXXX, hereafter referred to as X”).
Write in an active voice.
Space is precious. All specific details incorporated into the grant must be used. If you do not use a detail, then get rid of it.
Do not expect the reviewer to know as much about a topic as you do. F-grants and K-grants go to panels with a broad level of expertise.

In regards to grant formatting

Force yourself to use a font that is larger than what you need, this way when you convert the text to the appropriate size at the end you will have lots of space for final formatting.
Have sympathy for the reviewer! Make your application easy for the reviewer to read. Include lots of white space to make it easy on the eyes. Make the grant look attractive with figures.
Left justify your text

In regards to your specific aims

Have a lab member read your aims. The aims should be so clear that a fellow member of the lab should be able to guess what experiments you will propose after reading only the aims.
Include a graphical abstract in your research strategy that incorporates your three aims in a single figure.
In regards to writing the specific aims you need to do three things: (1) convince the reader that the research is important and exciting, (2) make sure the aims reflect the perfect experiments to address the question, and (3) convince the reader that you are the perfect person to do the experiments given the resources available to you.

Other tips and tricks

The term “in future studies” can be used at the end of a section as a means to include more experiments into a section. This will show the reviewer that you are thinking about future studies and but by writing it this way the grant will not appear to be overly ambitious.
Include a topic sentence at the beginning of every paragraph. If you read through your grant just reading these topic sentences, the outline of your grant should be clear.