How to write a lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing - Silvia Paul J. 2019

Writing Proposals for Grants and Fellowships

Adulthood is not nearly as glamorous as I thought it would be when I was a kid. I had planned on wearing X-ray glasses while driving my flying car; now I’d be happy finding my cheap sunglasses in the maelstrom of my minivan. “Fight the power!” evolved into “Because I said so.” But for some things, all the old advice works. Haste does make waste, one vice can indeed support two children, and there are millions of other fish in the industrial aquaculture facility.

It pains me when this happens—my professor side would like everything to be counterintuitive and complex—but sometimes we should admit that common sense is both common and sensible for a reason. In this chapter, we delve into the common sense of proposals for grants and fellowships. Our discussion applies to all kinds of proposals—from huge federal research grants in the sciences to small travel-grants and fellowships in the humanities—because the principles of successful proposals are mostly the same.

MOST GRANT WRITING CLICHÉS ARE TRUE

So you want to write your first grant proposal—what should you do? Exhibit 8.1 lists the standard things you always hear. If you go to a grant-writing workshop, browse online, or pester an old-timer for advice, you’ll hear all these tips, always, from everyone. Take a minute to read through it. If you’re like most academics, you’ll have a twinge of ambivalence. That part of your mind that survived years of graduate training—the small voice of conventional wisdom that likes classic rock and suspects that doughnuts can’t be as unhealthy as “they” say—will read the list and think, “Sure, sounds obvious. That all makes a lot of sense. I’ll do it.”

EXHIBIT 8.1. Conventional Wisdom for Grant-Writing

§ Your institution has an office that manages grants and submits proposals on your behalf. Contact this office as soon as you start thinking seriously about submitting something. Meet with them to learn what they will need from you and what they can do for you.

§ Plan to wrap up your proposal at least 2 weeks before it is due—the earlier, the better. This gives your institution time to route and process everything. (So few people do this that the grants staff will notice and appreciate your diligence. Someday you might be a bit late or need an urgent favor, and they will remember.)

§ Read the funding agency’s call for proposals—every last word, no matter how boring.

§ Read the funding agency’s submission guidelines and instructions—every last word, no matter how boring.

§ If the funding agency holds a workshop or webinar you can attend, attend it. If they have posted videos on their submission and review process, watch them.

§ When possible, discuss your idea with someone at the funding agency, such as a program official or grants coordinator.

§ Get examples of recent funded and unfunded proposals. If you don’t know who to ask, your institution’s grants office can usually get some samples for you.

§ Ask someone to give you feedback on a draft of your proposal. This person might be local (e.g., someone in your department who has had good fortune) or off-site (e.g., someone your institution pays to provide a mock peer review).

But that other part of your mind—the one honed and sharpened by graduate school, the one that prefers discourse to talking, text to writing, pedagogy to teaching—will think, “That’s the same old stuff everyone says. There must be more to it than that.” I hear you and acknowledge your suspicion of popular wisdom. After writing Exhibit 8.1, I felt an unsettling urge to buy pleated khakis and a knit polo shirt. The vaunted “wisdom of the crowd” is nearly always folly, but not when it comes to grant writing. I wouldn’t jump off a bridge just because everyone else at work was doing it, but I might if they all had lots of grants and assured me that it would improve my proposals.

FOOD FOR FUNDED THOUGHT

If it helps you join the herd and get with the program, consider Exhibit 8.1 as “the syllabus” for grant-writing—it covers the basics that you should follow to get a good grade. But what else can you do to make the muses of external funding smile favorably upon your humble efforts? Here are some ideas that should improve your odds over the long run.

DON’T WRITE A GRANT—WRITE GRANTS

Some things in life should not be done only once. I will leave most of them up to your overactive imagination, but writing grant proposals is one such thing. Writing your first grant is like teaching your very first class—there’s so much more to it than you thought. But your second time teaching that class is much easier, and the third is easier still. And most of that knowledge transfers when you create a new class—you already know the nuts-and-bolts of making a syllabus, creating lectures and assessments, and chanting the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy with your robes and thurible.

It isn’t worth learning how to plan, write, and submit grant proposals if you intend to submit only one. Your first complex federal proposal, like a National Institutes of Health research grant or a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, will hurt. No one has forms, instructions, and guidelines like the feds do. But the second proposal is much easier, and the third is easier still. From the beginning, then, you need a “grants, not a grant” mind-set. The decision, for example, is not “Should I write an NEH fellowship?” but “Should I submit an NEH fellowship proposal at least every few years until I get one?” It’s better to invest in books and articles than to dabble with grant proposals.

ARE YOU AN ELEPHANT OR A SEAHORSE?

Some creatures, like elephants, give birth to relatively few babies but invest heavily in them. Other creatures, like seahorses, give birth to thousands of babies but invest little in them. What’s your grant-writing species? Some scholars are grant elephants. Because they slowly gestate their proposals, they don’t submit many of them, but their proposals are always ready for the world. Other scholars are grant seahorses. Because they churn out proposals, they’re not emotionally attached to any single one and know that most of them will be eaten by the crustaceans on the review panel.

Elephants submit to only a few sponsors. A pachydermatic psychologist who studies depression, for example, might submit only to the National Institutes of Health and to a private foundation devoted to mental health. Over time, elephants develop tacit knowledge, expertise, and relationships with the sponsors that increase the odds that their fledgling proposals will be viable. Seahorses, in contrast, submit to a huge set of sponsors. Federal agencies, large charities, small foundations, local nonprofits, random passersby with change jingling loudly in their pockets—they’ll all get proposals.

Although I’m more Elephantidae than Hippocampinae, no one species is right for everyone. An elephant seeks success through strategy and craft; its natural habitat is a college or university department that values grants but doesn’t require external funding for promotion. A seahorse seeks success through volume and probability; its natural habitat is wherever soft-money jobs are found, such as medical schools, think tanks, and free-standing research centers. The middle ground—giving too little attention to too few proposals—isn’t evolutionarily stable, so you should pick a side.

COMPETE ON YOUR HOME FIELD

No matter how humble your field of scholarship might be, it’s yours. Your home field—your primary scholarly topic—is where you have the highest profile and the strongest reputation. When you write grant proposals, you want to compete on your home field. Getting grants is hard enough without having to grind out a victory in someone’s else stadium. Nevertheless, researchers chasing money often find themselves far from home. They see a funding opportunity announcement for some hot topic and think, “Hey, we might be able to come up with an idea for that.”

Any field with funding has three groups of researchers competing for it. Imagine, for example, that a funding opportunity announcement comes out on a pressing biomedical topic, perhaps the early detection of dementia. Three groups of scientists will apply. The first and smallest group has the researchers who fundamentally study that topic—they’re playing on their home field—and some of them are the field’s most important and influential scholars. Dementia research is what they do: they’ve been studying it for a while, and all the best grad students and postdocs want to work with them. This group will get most of the grants.

The second group has the researchers whose work has something to offer the problem. They don’t fundamentally study dementia, in our example, but their work overlaps with the problem and can credibly inform it. This group will get some funding, but not as much. The third, and largest, group has the broad community of researchers who do work that tangentially touches the field. They could—with some stretching and spinning—look like credible players, but they fundamentally study something else. Their proposals rarely stick.

Don’t be that third group that chases money. Grant proposals are funded relatively (“Is this one of the best proposals that we received this round?”) rather than absolutely (“Is this proposal good?”). It doesn’t matter if your proposal is good, or even great, in its own right—it must be better than most of the other proposals, and nearly all of them are pretty good. And once you realize that the best-known researchers in a field are always applying, you see why you need to compete on your home field. When an intriguing funding opportunity announcement comes out, don’t think, “I bet we can form an appealing team and try to get in on that.” Instead, before applying, we should ask ourselves, “many of the most famous scholars in that field are going to apply, too. Can we, as interlopers, beat them on their home field?”

BRIDESMAIDS HAVE MORE FUN

In the humanities, a grant or fellowship usually has only one applicant—the person visiting the archive, writing the book, or interrogating the textual materiality. In the sciences, however, a grant proposal usually has a big, cheery team, much like a wedding party. Its bride is the Principal Investigator (PI), the person responsible for executing and managing the project; its bridesmaids go by many names—Co-Investigators, Collaborators, Consultants, or Coattail Riders, depending on what they do. They support the PI by bringing focused skills, such as recruiting a hard-to-reach sample, applying a tool or method, or making centerpieces from mason jars and mulberry twigs.

The PI has the most glamorous role, but everyone knows that the bridesmaids have more fun. Indeed, you can get married only so many times. Grant mavens are rarely the PI on all, or even most, of their funded projects. Instead, they’re plugged into several teams where they can attract some funding for their work and contribute to an interesting project. If your home field isn’t especially fertile for funding, you can cultivate skills that make you an effective collaborator. People with expertise in complicated, technical topics—especially methodological and statistical expertise—who can write quickly will attract more offers to collaborate on proposals than they can handle.

DON’T DESPAIR

Some areas of scholarship are barren deserts for grant funding. Scholars in the humanities might submit 20 fellowship proposals in the hopes of getting $8,000 to visit a distant archive or writing retreat. Scholars in the life sciences, in contrast, can request a few million dollars from NIH—a small slice of the tens of billions it awards each year—with a relatively short proposal. It is what it is. The world isn’t fair. If you’re in the humanities, the grass really is much greener on the other side, largely because of their big budget for fertilizer and landscaping.

If you work in a funding desert, don’t despair. It isn’t an indictment of the value of your research field. Exhibit 8.2 provides a slightly cynical list of factors that predict whether an area of research will be flush with funding. But what can you do about it? One option is to change your area of scholarship. Many desert-dwellers pack up and move to more fertile fields. Some researchers retool to learn new methods and skills, others develop a secondary line of work with more funding potential, and a few shift their interests entirely to whatever is hot and profitable. I’m not necessarily advocating for this option, but it makes sense for some scholars. For most of us, though, we didn’t get into academics to cater to the fickle priorities of funding agencies.

EXHIBIT 8.2. The Geography of Grant Deserts

When viewed cynically, the world of grants is oddly rational. You can predict how much funding a research area gets with a few factors.

§ Does the topic appeal to politicians? Federal agencies are the big players in scholarly funding. A handful of motivated politicians can create new agencies with multimillion dollar budgets, such as when a few influential senators interested in bee pollen and cow colostrum sparked the creation of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (Atwood, 2003).

§ Does the topic appeal to people who show up to vote? Many medical researchers suspect that it isn’t a coincidence that funding for diseases of aging vastly outstrips funding for diseases of childhood.

§ Is the topic politically stigmatized? If you’re an American studying topics like climate change, the failure of abstinence-based approaches to sexual education, and the sunny sides of prohibited drugs, you know what I mean.

§ Does the topic appeal to wealthy philanthropists? A single wealthy patron with quirky interests can fund an entire area of scholarship.

§ Does the topic make powerful interests uncomfortable? Critical and controversial approaches to fraught topics, such as gender, race, and education, get less funding than research projects that don’t rock the yacht.

§ Does the topic make or save someone money or solve a pressing practical problem? Corporate contracts are a huge source of funding if you have an idea that can make or save them money.

Another option is to decide not to bother with applying for grants. Instead of moving from your funding desert, you can grow where you’re planted. Of course, you’ll grow into a Bonker hedgehog cactus instead of a tropical cinnamon fern, but there’s nothing wrong with that—the prickly spines might even keep a few pesky service assignments away. If your field’s opportunities for funding are sparse, and if you can flourish in your job without funding, then forswearing the hassle of grants can be a thoughtful, rational choice. Time spent researching, writing, and submitting grants is time not spent writing the articles and books you’re passionate about.

I think the sciences and humanities could use an intergroup empathy intervention (Stephan & Finlay, 1999). Some humanities scholars, cursing bitterly over the cornucopia of funding in the sciences, suspect that the chemistry faculty are lighting the Bunsen burners with $100 bills. In truth, funding supply and researcher supply always reach a depressing equilibrium. Any area of research with a lot of funding (e.g., diseases of aging) quickly attracts gaggles of young researchers, so the success rates collapse after a couple years. Nevertheless, researchers in funding-rich fields often must obtain grants to get promoted and tenured. In some medical science departments, for example, you’ll be fired if you don’t bring in 50%, 100%, or even 150% of your annual salary in funding each year, averaged over the past few years. The pressure can be crippling: If your next proposal doesn’t get funded, you and everyone who works for you will be unemployed.

Likewise, the scientists think the humanities faculty have it easy. They don’t have to apply for grants, and they won’t get fired if they don’t scrounge up funding from slow, opaque, and politicized federal agencies. And many scientists have keenly inquired why so many American scholars study problems in history and literature that require traveling to popular European tourist locations. Fair enough. But the scientists don’t have to write long, complex books that require (a) reading dozens and dozens of other long, complex books, and (b) persuading one of a declining number of publishers to print it. In departments that require a book to be in-press for promotion and tenure, an assistant professor’s career is at the mercy of how quickly book editors and external reviewers get around to the manuscript.

DON’T NEGLECT YOUR PUBLISHED WORK

All ecosystems have predators and prey. In our academic worlds, some of our goals and tasks are predators—they gobble other, weaker goals that didn’t quite make it to shelter. Despite all our grousing at the end of the semester, teaching rarely gobbles writing. I genuinely believe, in a tacit way that’s hard to articulate, that my writing and teaching are the same intellectual beast—much like a two-headed box turtle hatched in a fetid academic pond. Instead, writing gobbles writing. Some kinds of writing projects suck up time in your writing schedule with little payoff (see Silvia, 2015). In the marshy swampland of academic writing, your books and articles are fluffy, twee hatchlings, and your grant proposals are the invasive emerald tree boas that gobble them.

A good article manuscript will probably get published somewhere, and a good book manuscript will eventually find a publisher. But an unfunded grant proposal is dead in the water. Sometimes you can harvest a few pages for a manuscript, but when a grant proposal gets rejected you’re usually left with a big carcass suitable only for taxidermy.

Juggling writing projects is endlessly vexing (see Chapter 3). Because unfunded grant proposals won’t get published, they evaporate into history—along with the hours of writing time they gobbled that could have been spent on the sure-things of articles and books. Many scholars thus find themselves in a trap: They need grants for promotion and tenure, but they need publications, too. Time spent on articles and books usually pays off; time spent on grants, however, might be a boon but is usually a bust. When a department requires funding for promotion—common in the sciences—a writer could end up with no grants and few articles, the worst of both worlds.

This tension can’t be resolved, but you can make your grant-writing more efficient by using some of the advice discussed earlier. In particular, focusing on only a couple sponsors, as elephants do, saves an enormous amount of time spent researching sponsors, learning their guidelines, and reworking your boilerplate materials. Likewise, focusing on your core expertise saves an enormous amount of time spent researching tangential fields of scholarship. Grant proposals will still compete with your articles and books, but they’ll gobble less of your writing time if you’re focused and strategic.

CONCLUSION

During a cathartic rant about grant writing, someone once told me, “I could write a book in the time it takes to write two grants.” That sounds about right to me. A short psychology book might be around three or four big federal proposals; a book in history or religious studies might be seven or eight. Unless your job is to write grants, you shouldn’t lose sight of why people apply for them. We have ideas we want to develop, projects we want to do, and things we want to say. Applying for grants can move those goals along, but we shouldn’t let the allure of untold riches—and the resulting untold annual budget, compliance, and reporting forms that you hear less about—distract us from our books and articles.