金唢呐
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作者：金唢呐 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
[分享] 老外说申请基金3件绝对不能写的东东 [复制链接]
Three deadly sins of grant writing
By Morgan Giddings
4 January 2011
You’ve just gotten the rejection back, and it stings.
Your reviewers wrote about all sorts of technical issues with your proposal. You scrambled to fix those issues – only to receive another rejection with a different set of “issues”.
Are your reviewers insane?
No, but they’re also not giving you the whole story of why they rejected your grant.
They’re not intentionally hiding information. Rather, they had a gut reaction (like/dislike/hate) to your proposal, and all that stuff they wrote was just a rationalization of their reaction.
It wouldn’t be so great for you or for the reviewer if they just wrote “I didn’t like this proposal, my gut told me so!” They’d never be invited to review again. (Who knows, maybe that’s a strategy to get out of reviewing, like trying to get out of jury duty?)
But anyway: that’s the way we humans make decisions. It almost always starts from a subconscious (‘gut’) reaction, and then we must come up with reasonable sounding words to support that reaction. This justification is not just for other people; it’s for ourselves. It makes our egos feel good, because then we’re fully justified in any decision we made.
If you think you’re immune to that kind of decision-making process, just examine the next few decisions you make. It can be illuminating (and you could also check out the book by Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational).
This brings us back to your grant: the first impression that you make is vitally important if you want the gut reaction to go in your favor. There are lots of ways to help you, and equally there are some ways you can seriously hinder that gut reaction.
Here is my current favorite top-3 list of deadly sins in grant writing, that you’re unlikely to overcome no matter how good your project is:
1.Write highly dense, technical prose that is designed only for a specialist in your field to read. Assume that your reader knows everything you know, including all the buzzwords and technical details. Make sure to overwhelm her with all those details in order to impress her. Don’t bother to be educational or make the prose easy to read. We’re all smart, academics with all the time in the world to wade through difficult text, right? Yes, definitely assume that your reader has unlimited time and energy to wade through your grant.
2.Don’t bother to thoroughly develop your Specific Aims page before launching into writing the text of your proposal. Just start writing, and ‘see what happens.’ Zigzag around a bit, change what you’re doing, and then keep going back and changing around your aims. Make sure you are doing this up to the last minute, and that you forget to make your aims line up with what you say in your proposal. Not only will you be having a lot of fun in your last-minute writing frenzy, but your reviewer will have the pleasure of consuming your spaghetti writing. He’ll enjoy late nights reading your proposal trying to figure out what you’re proposing to do, much like Sherlock Holmes. Yes indeed, you’ll certainly win praise this way.
3.Make sure to dive right into the technical details of your elegant experiments, without giving any background about why the project is important in the first place. Wow your reviewer with your elegant experiments, designed to answer obviously important questions. Don’t worry about the funding agency thinks it’s important work, only worry about whether your experiments are elegant enough that only a buffoon could ignore that fact. And of course assume that elegant experiments equals grant funded, because elegance equals importance.
The bottom line is that you need to make it easy on your reviewer. Each of these sins can be readily avoided if you simply put yourself in your reader’s shoes, realizing that the reader has a tough job, and as a writer, it is your job to make it easier for them.
If you’ve recently had a grant rejected, I suggest you have a look at it from the context of these three deadly sins. Before trying to revise your project or approach, first consider whether you could simply fix things by eliminating these sins from your writing. It is amazing how far that can go.
If you want a series of free training videos on grant writing, including how to write the ‘killer’ specific aims, have a look over here: https://marketyourscience.com/thescientistvids
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Morgan Giddings, PhD trains scientists and academics from all over the world how to get more grant funding and recognition with less stress and effort. She also does research in bioinformatics, proteomics, and genomics to address issues like cancer.
Full text Link: http://blog.the-scientist.com/2011/01/04/three-deadly-sins-of-grant-writing-2/
作者：金唢呐 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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