
Writing Grant Applications - herodotus
https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/10/im-good-enough-im-smart-enough-and-dog-gone-it-people-like-me-writing-grant-applications
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mindfulhack
I'm a successful full-time professional grantwriter. There are about 100
tricks in the book for standing out from the pack, though not all apply to all
categories or instances of grants.

But no matter what type of grant it is, the biggest point I tell people is
this:

You need a _story_.

All other aspects flow from that. (E.g. how effectively you can communicate
the flow of logic in the writing, and other technical aspects which include
much more than just the text boxes and what this blog summarily describes.)

Find that story, then it will rise above the pack. Most people want grant
money but have no idea what it takes to get it.

~~~
WnZ39p0Dgydaz1
Reminds me of academic papers. When I first started in academia I thought it
was all about merit, results, and following a proper scientific process.

Turns out if you want to be successful, as measured by paper acceptances or
citations, which is the standard metric used by universities and companies,
it's all about being able to tell a good story to convince reviewers.

A well-told and convincing story can hide all kind of faults in your
experiments or results. It's pretty much all you need.

~~~
gradstudent
Having a good story isn't about hiding the faults in your work, it's about
making your work accessible to others. It's no good having tons of experiments
if you can't explain what they mean and why anyone else should care.

~~~
skummetmaelk
While that is true, the problem is that bad science is easily masked by
telling a good story. When telling the story is more important than the
science itself, you end up with more and more extravagant projects that always
end in failure to achieve anything close to what was written in the grant
application.

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azhenley
The grant process is terrible. I’m a second year professor in the US and wish
I had known how terrible this process is years ago.

Even though my first federal grant (NSF) was funded, the process was one of
the most draining things I have ever done.

I loved the puzzle of breaking down a new, fun idea into its fundamental parts
and I enjoy writing. But I do not enjoy the salesmanship, the 7% funding rate,
the 8 months I waited to find out my second proposal was rejected, or the
laborious amounts of supplemental documents.

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forgingahead
Grant applications are generally a waste of time, akin to writing a mini-
thesis just so you have the opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Grant
awarding is also incredibly opaque, and generally very biased to the reviewers
(ie, corrupt), with random variables playing a part in decision making that
have no bearing on the actual capabilities of the grant-writers.

Worse, reviewers and grant-makers themselves are generally unqualified to make
such grants, and as such, have no ability nor incentive to track the success
of grants issued.

All in all, if you need money in academia, your best bet is to either be
independently wealthy to fund your ideas, or find a few direct personal
benefactors who believe in you and your general goals.

*Edit -- if you are here in HN, then your ability to do the latter suggestion (find a few personal benefactors) is actually much more within reach than getting funded through a grant -- it is certainly worth your time to explore that option, and in the long-run will provide you more security and freedom to really explore your field and interests.

~~~
jonathanstrange
As someone who has successfully obtained various grants, I wouldn't say they
are a waste of time, but I agree that it's essentially a reviewer lottery
among the good to excellent applications. At least that's the case in the
humanities where evaluation is more subjective anyway. I've had more or less
the same application fail miserably in one call and succeed immediately in
another, for instance.

The problem with grants is that each one of them has their own evaluation
criteria, panels, and overall decision structure, so what works for one type
of grant is useless with another. That makes writing them so time consuming.

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ISL
This is missing a key ingredient. Call the Program Officer and figure out what
they want. If what you want to do doesn't align with what they're trying to
achieve with the program, you will never get meaningful funding.

Your project need not align exactly, but it must support the cause of the
program, otherwise it is dead in the water, no matter how well-written.

Good Program Officers are happy to communicate with PIs, and will help them
make great applications. You need them, and they need you. Build that team. Do
it early and often.

~~~
Fomite
Note that this will vary greatly by funding agency and the specific call.

For example, the NSF can do a degree of steering, etc. The CDC, depending on
program, has either full control, or absolutely none at all.

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jseliger
It is very hard for most people to write effectively, unless they've dedicated
conscious effort to learning to do so. We've worked with brilliant scientific
and technical people who do not communicate their ideas well:
[https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-
gr...](https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-grant-
proposals/).

This: [https://seliger.com/2017/08/21/grant-writing-help-series-
put...](https://seliger.com/2017/08/21/grant-writing-help-series-put-
important-thing-first-sentence/) is about one example of effective non-fiction
persuasive writing like scientific and technical grants: "Put the most
important thing in the first sentence." By the way, the whole Dave Barry
interview is worth reading: [https://medium.com/conversations-with-
tyler/tyler-cowen-dave...](https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-
cowen-dave-barry-books-blog-quotes-5ba317949bd8), although most of it doesn't
seem to be immediately on topic.

~~~
sdrothrock
> We've worked with brilliant scientific and technical people who do not
> communicate their ideas well

Alan Alda did as well and that was what gave birth to the idea for his book,
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face?
([https://www.amazon.com/Understood-Would-Have-This-Look-
ebook...](https://www.amazon.com/Understood-Would-Have-This-Look-
ebook/dp/B01M61KNLW))

It has a big focus on improv that can be distracting from the main message of
the book, but I found it really insightful and had my assistant read it for
discussion about how to improve communication skills and awareness.

------
wsxcde
This is practical advice, but it also points to the reality of scientific
funding today -- you can only get money to do things that you already know how
to do. You must have an idea that is pretty much ready to go on day one. All
that should remain are working out the details.

I can see why bureaucrats and government officials prefer it this way
(accountability!) but I don't understand why we scientists put up with it.

~~~
bonoboTP
It stuck with me what a famous Hungarian ethologist (Csányi) said in a radio
interview recently: you propose the things that you already discovered in the
grant application and then use the money to discover new stuff.

He generally had a grim view of academia and is senior enough to afford to
speak his mind.

~~~
wsxcde
I actually think it's not as bad as some make it out to be, _provided_ grants
are funded at a reasonable rate. What's changed over the last couple of
decades or so is that funding rates are single digit percentages. This is the
real problem. My advisor said that when he was a younger researcher, it wasn't
quite so hard to get funding so he had more time to pursue independent ideas.

Even as a much younger researcher, I feel that at any point in time, I usually
have a couple of worthwhile new ideas that are quite likely to pan out and
will get funded someplace or another. But if I have to spend a multiple months
of effort into getting them funded, I have a lot less time available to
generate the next couple of good ideas. This doesn't mean that people just
stop doing research, most researchers are competitive workaholics. Instead,
we'll just rehash the same old stuff in a new bottle: we target newer
applications and/or chase the latest fads (e.g. adversarial ML) with the goal
of getting some of our old ideas reused in a new domain.

This creates a negative feedback loop because the quality of research gets
worse and the people think this stuff is not worth funding and that in turn
reduces funding rates even lower which causes research to get worse.

Unfortunately, scientists working on "useless" ideas wasting public money is a
much too convenient bogeyman for politicians to give up.

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bertr4nd
Something I like about This advice is that it puts the research idea at the
center of the writing. Too often these sort of recommendations don’t seem to
even acknowledge that “having a worthwhile idea” is important, and make it
sound like getting a grant/paper is mostly a matter of writing tricks.

------
Tade0
A friend of mine was in the M87 imaging team.

He's a brilliant scientist, but more importantly he learned how to write
effective grant applications early on.

He might have not gotten this far without this skill.

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6510
I've had countless ideas, most bad, some good, some fantastic. Quite often
there is someone to be found who already had it and worked at horribly,
reasonably or in an awe inspiring way. A few years ago an idea of mine evolved
into something spectacular (while still remaining just an idea) it was
original and I now consider it the best idea in the history of humanity. The
best part is that humanity [in its snail like progress] is also ready for it.

~~~
hazz99
What is it?

~~~
xemoka
I think that’s the punch line of a joke after reading this article.

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alpineidyll3
Protip: unless you are already deeply embedded in your field of reviewers
having cultivated years of reputation and circular nepotism, you're better off
getting a real job to fund your research. Grants are a circle jerk.

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sgt101
I have reviewed for a handful of organisations. My learning is that different
orgs and funding programs need different emphasis. H2020 is all process and
consortium, Epsrc is project and ambition.

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wiggler00m
Applying for grants is a giant waste of time for most startups (opinion,
obviously, some exceptions).

