Tag Archives: zombie text

Writing a research grant application: the quick way and the easy way.

There are two ways of writing a grant application, the quick way and the easy way.

The Quick Way

The quick way is to start by writing a set of key sentences. Each key sentence states one of the points that you will need to make in the case for support. These points include the main research goal, what makes the goal important, the sub-goals, the lines of research that will deliver the sub-goals, and so on. 

Writing the key sentences is hard work, but it only takes a couple of hours. If you can’t draft a set of key sentences in a couple of hours then you know you are not ready to write a grant application. On the other hand, when you write a set of key sentences you get more than the knowledge that you are ready to write. You get a short-cut to the finished case for support.  The key sentences enable you to write the full case for support in a couple of weeks.

The key sentences give you a short cut because the full case for support is simply an expanded version of the key sentences. It consists of a series of sections, each of which begins with a key sentence. Each of the sections should also have a heading that uses phrases from the key sentence. The remainder of each section consists of a few paragraphs that expand and justify the point made by the key sentence. 

Not only is it easy to write the case for support with the key sentences, it is easy to keep it short. And if it gets too long it is easy to shorten it. Every section starts by saying what is most important. If you write too much in any section you can trim the unimportant stuff from the end.

The Easy Way

It’s only a grant application. Why make it difficult?

Despite these advantages of the key sentence approach, most writers prefer to write a grant the easy way. They just start writing. If you write the easy way you won’t have the key sentences to guide your writing but you will have saved yourself two hours of dull work, so as long as you can work out what to write you will  surely finish sooner if you start the easy way.

It’s obviously best to discuss the most important issues first. Describe your research question and what makes it important to your chosen funder. Pretty soon you will have several pages of text. There’s lots of helpful advice on the web about what you should include. A google search  on writing a good research grant application give 37.6 million hits. Some of the top hits in the google search are written by the funders themselves.  The funders tell you exactly what to do, in detail. This page on content and presentation on ESRC’s website lists 37 points you should include and 5 questions you should answer. Following this advice will make it very easy to write a lot of text very quickly.

Unfortunately, there is no advice about how to write clearly. The most likely outcome is that the document you write will be a misshapen monster, far too long and completely unreadable. Editing a badly structured document of any kind is futile and utterly miserable. The excellent @thesiswhisperer blog likens the process to fighting a jungle war. If you are unlucky, you will have supportive colleagues who will encourage you to persevere in this miserable task. In fact you should quit and start again.

You should quit because because line-by-line edits do not fix the real problem, the poor structure. The more you edit, the worse it gets. You will work for months and when you finish you will know in your heart of hearts that your case for support is a mess.

Foolishly, you will nurture a vain hope that maybe you are being overly critical because you have been working so hard. You will reach out to your supportive colleagues for reassurance. They will know how hard you have worked and will want to support your morale, rather than help you write a good case for support. When you ask them for comments, they will lie, to protect your morale. They will see that the case for support is a mess, but they want to be supportive, so they will tell you to dot a couple of i’s and cross a couple of t’s and you will breathe a sigh of relief and submit your grant application.

The point at which you discover the truth about your grant application is when you get the results of peer review, nine months after submitting. At this point you will probably no longer be pleased that you saved the two hours it would have taken to write the key sentences.

If you are lucky, when you find yourself with a misshapen monster grant application, you will engage a consultant like me who will tell you some really good news. Your misshapen monster of a grant application can be salvaged. There is an easy way to restructure the case for support that only takes a day or so. You start by writing a set of key sentences……..

Reshape Your Draft Grant Application

20005338_sLast week I explained how to tell if your grant application is misshapen. This post is about how to get it into shape.

Let’s start with the most difficult kind of draft to deal with, one in which it’s hard to tell the shape of the proposal because it’s written in such a way that you can’t tell what a paragraph is about until you have analysed its meaning. Last week I described this kind of writing as zombie text.

The first step with zombie text  is to identify the topic of each paragraph. The next step is the same with zombie text and with text where the paragraph starts with the topic. It is to find the best grouping of paragraphs into larger subsections.

Dealing with Zombie Text

The first step with zombie text is to use the reverse outlining  procedure described on @thesiswhisperer’s blog about the zombie thesis to identify the paragraph topics. There is another description of reverse outlining on @explorstlye’s blog, Explorations of Style.

  1. Number the paragraphs in your draft. Open a new document, give it a different title and copy the whole text of your draft into it.
  2. Replace each paragraph in the new document with a single short sentence that states its point. Keep the numbering so that you can copy across the remaining text from the original document when you need to.
    • If you can’t state the point of a paragraph with a single sentence then you probably need to revise your approach to paragraphs. There is good advice in the explorations of style blog and in lots of other places on the web. For this exercise just split the paragraphs into smaller chunks that canbe summarised with a single sentence and give them compound numbers (2.1, 2.2 etc).

If your draft is written so that the first sentence of each paragraph states the topic of the paragraph then you simply number the paragraphs and create a new document containing just the first sentence of each paragraph, still numbered.

In the reverse outlining process you rearrange the order of the topic sentences until you find the best structure for your document. With grant applications we already know what the best structure is, so the task is to arrange the text in that structure. We start with the largest component of the case for support, the description of the project.

Description of the project: key sentences and topic sentences

The next step is to sort the topic sentences of the paragraphs on the research project into five or six sections. In order to do this you will need to have worked out the main details of your research project. At the very least you will have divided the project into three or four sub-projects and you will know what outcome each sub-project will produce.

ZombieGrantWarningIf you haven’t done this then I am afraid I have bad news. This post will not help you: you have a zombie grant. There is no point in rewriting it until you have designed a project.

I’m sorry if this is disappointing but I can’t change the facts of life. The best I can do is to help you deal with them. A grant application is a marketing document for a research project. Without a research project, it can never be more than an empty shell, a zombie.

The best help I can offer is to say that the text you have written may be useful but you need to design a project  in order to use it. This post tells you how to design and catalogue sub-projects and  this post tells you how to check whether a particular group of sub-projects makes a viable project. I will deal more specifically with zombie grants in a future post.

So, if you have a potentially viable grant application you need to sort the topic sentences into five or six sub-sections as follows:-

  • a general introductory section,
  • three or four sections describing the specific sub-projects, and
  • a section saying what you will do with the overall results of the project.

You should now select, or draft, a key sentence that will be the first sentence for each of these five or six sections.  This post tells you how but here’s a rough outline.

  • The key sentence for each sub-project should say something about what the research activities are in the sub-project and it should say what they will discover or what the outcome will be. It has the form [Very brief descripton of research activities in the subproject] will [show, discover, reveal, or other suitable verb] [whatever the outcome of the research in that sub-project will be]. If you have written such a sentence, by all means use it, but if you haven’t, you need to write it now.
    • As you write each of these key sentences you should write a corresponding key sentence for the background to the project and paste it into the corresponding sub-section of the background of the case for support. This sentence states that we need to know whatever the corresponding sub-project will discover. The general form is We need to  know [or discover, understand or similar verb] [the outcome of the research in the corresponding sub-project].
  • The key sentence for the introductory sub-section on the research project as a whole should say what kind of research it will involve, something about the facilities it will use – especially if these are distinctive in some way, and what it will discover.
  • The key sentence for the sub-section on what you will do with the overall results may be about publication or about dissemination or exploitation of the results in some other way.

Once you have the key sentences in place you should copy each numbered topic sentence into the section where it fits best. Then arrange them in the best possible order. Now you are ready for the detail.

Final shaping of the description of the project

Once you have the topic sentences in the right order you  should take text from the body of each original paragraph and edit it so that the paragraphs flow internally and from one to the next. The introductory subsection should contain a description of your general research approach together with any necessary preliminaries. The sub-sections corresponding to the sub-projects should contain  a coherent description of your intended research activities that makes it clear how they will lead to the result mentioned in the introductory key sentence.

This is the point at which you adjust the length. Remember, the full description of the project should be at least 50% of the case for support. If it is more than about 65% then you either have too much detail or too big a project. Keep adjusting and trimming until you have a description of your research project that is the right size.

The next step is to produce a background section that convinces the reader that we need to know what your research project will discover. You already have key sentences that  define three or four of its five or six subsections. I will tell you how to produce the rest of it next week.