Since before Jacqueline Aldridge and I published The Research Funding Toolkit nearly 13 years ago I have read every book, blog, or website I could find on how to write research-grant applications. At the beginning I did this because I was looking for a book that would help colleagues to write. After I had failed to find anything suitable and we had put my ideas into our book, I was interested in the competition. Until now the reading has been dull work, tempered only by the grim satisfaction that there is no competition. Karlin’s book changes that. It deals only with writing, so it is narrower in scope and shorter than the Research Funding Toolkit, but its advice on writing is more comprehensive, just as clear, and absolutely right. In sum: on the topic it deals with, it is the better book.

Like me, Karlin has seen both sides of the research-grant decision process and has spent 10 years coaching researchers, so it is no surprise that following his advice would lead you to write an application with exactly the kind of style and structure that I recommend. He also starts from the same premise as I do: the composition of grants committees makes it necessary to write grant applications in such a way that an outsider can ‘get’ the main points in a few minutes even though it contains a lot of technical detail. However, Karlin’s approach to this problem is different from mine. I tell you about the structure of a grant application; he tells you about writing style.

Karlin devotes the whole of chapter 2 to his first style point, the need to harmonise terminology: if you repeat anything, you must always use exactly the same word or phrase. This is sensible because this style point is the most important, the simplest to explain, the hardest for academics to accept and the most difficult for them to adopt. It requires a combination of persuasive argument and helpful advice to get academics to accept the point, and a lifetime of vigilance for them to adopt it in their writing.

Chapter 3 discusses headings and their relationship with the text they head, which gives Karlin the opportunity to introduce structure. Like me, Karlin advocates that text should be structured as pyramids. Every paragraph, every section, and the whole grant application should begin with a one-line take-away conclusion. However, he avoids the pyramid metaphor. Instead he uses the much catchier acronym BLUF, which stands for “Bottom Line Up Front”.

Karlin recommends that a grant application be structured as a tree (he calls this arboreal structure). The tree’s trunk describes the main point of the research and the main branches describe the background to the research, and the research itself.

• The background main branch divides into sub-branches that state the importance of the problems that the research will solve.
  • These sub-branches divide into twigs that deal with points of evidence.
• The research main branch divides into sub-branches that state what kind of research will solve each problem.
  • These sub-branches divide into twigs that deal with research details.

I’m not going to try and summarise the whole book here, but the details of the arboreal structure make it very similar to the PIPPIN framework. And the advice in the book is backed up by helpful examples, so I will have no hesitation recommending it to participants in my workshops.

I think the book will be useful for anybody who is trying to write a grant application, whether it is their first application, or the latest in a long series, and whether or not they have been to one of my workshops. I also think the book could be a game-changer for people who start to write a grant application without having worked out the details of their project. I will have more advice for these people in a future post.