Writing for Publication: Transitions and Tools that Support Scholars’ Success - Mary Renck Jalongo, Olivia N. Saracho 2016

Grants as Writing Opportunities
From a Single Work to Multiple Scholarly Spin-Offs
Writing as Professional Development

When you think about it, highly productive faculty members are making proposals to undertake new projects all of the time. They propose new courses, programs, projects, books, and so forth. They request release time from teaching, travel support, sabbatical leaves, and training opportunities. They send in their applications and CVs to be considered for honors and awards. Although it is common to refer to writing grants, what people actually mean by that is writing the a formal request/application, in the form of a proposal, to get financial support for a project or research. What proposal writers actually are seeking is a contract—a work order from the grantor that makes the expectations explicit (Locke, Spirduso, & Silverman, 2013).

A doctoral student in science confided that she once attended a grant writing workshop and the presenter included an anonymous excerpt from “the worst grant proposal we ever received”. As she began reading the material projected on the screen, the student was stunned to realize it was a proposal that she had submitted! Why had the proposal failed so miserably? It was because she wrote an impassioned plea for an audience consisting of like-minded colleagues when actually, the reviewers were nonspecialists seeking assurances that the money would be yield impressive results. It was not the case that she was a terrible writer, incapable of generating a high-quality grant proposal, or had a useless project in mind. However, she did not have a rudimentary understanding of grant writing, was operating on the wrong set of assumptions, and had failed to prepare herself adequately.

Several things about this event are noteworthy. First, the student went on to defend her dissertation successfully, publish her work, and get grant funding. Second, she was already taking positive action to remedy the problems of her first attempt at grant writing and improve her skills. Third, she shared her mortifying experience with her classmates in a doctoral course in the hopes that it might prevent others from making a similar mistake. Her sincere desire to improve, ability to rebound, and generosity in helping others controlled the damage that initial failure could have done.

Online Tool

Refer to University of North Carolina’s Writing Center website for guidance on writing grant proposals at http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/grant-proposals-or-give-me-the-money/

Grant writing is an evidence-based, persuasive writing task:

A proposal’s overt function is to persuade a committee of scholars that the project shines with the three kinds of merit all disciplines value, namely, conceptual innovation, methodological rigor, and rich, substantive content….Other things being equal, the proposal that is awarded funding is the one that gets its merits across more forcefully. (Przeworski and Salomon, 1995, p. 1)

Nationally, only about 10 % of the grant projects that are proposed are funded (Bourne & Chalupa, 2006)—a rate somewhat higher than the acceptance rate of many prestigious journals. How can you improve chances for success? The best way to gain support for such proposals is to study the guidelines, start the process very early, get feedback from knowledgeable others, revise the proposal accordingly, and submit all materials exactly as required. As with writing journal articles, audience awareness is crucial. Many times, your audience for a grant proposal consists of people who do not share your area of expertise. If competing for an “in-house” small grant at your institution, for example, the reviewers are likely to be a university-wide committee with varied areas of specializations. If competing for a grant in the local or larger community, the evaluators probably will be business people from the area. For state, federal and nonprofit grants, the evaluators are apt to be a distinguished, diverse group with little knowledge about your specific project or even your discipline (see CDC guidelines). Grant proposals fail when they take a “give me the money” approach and fail to show how others will benefit. They also fail when they take a “me too” approach and propose something that is routine, ordinary, and unremarkable. Table 11.5 contains a self-questioning framework that takes these audiences into account (Lunghofer, 2015).

Table 11.5

11 questions winning grant writers can answer

Source: Lisa Lunghofer, Ph.D. www.makinggoodwork.org Good Causes • Great Results

Activity 11.5: First Steps Toward Grant Writing

Using Lunghofer’s questions that a grant writer needs to answer in Table 11.5 as a framework, write a brief answer to every question. Be sure that you are client-centered in your approach and that your answers are fashioned to your primary audience—the reviewers from the funding agency.

Grant funding can be tricky because it is affected by (1) the funding agency, (2) the discipline and (3) the institution. To illustrate a particular funder’s expectations, the director of a multi-million dollar foundation grant once told me that, when the short list of finalists came to make their presentations to the Board, only a few of them thought to include teachers, staff, parents, and students. From the committee’s perspective, it was a serious oversight to send “only the suits” from the central office when the grant initiative was focused on all of the stakeholders. So, when in doubt, they tended to rule in favor of those teams that demonstrated this inclusiveness. Knowledge of the priorities of the funding group is critical. The two broad categories of grants—those that support original research and those that fund service projects—require very different types of proposals.

From a disciplinary perspective, expectations for writing grants often differ considerably. Just think about how different the style of these grant proposals would be: an artist seeking support to produce creative work, an English professor conducting research on second language writing, a psychologist implementing a suicide prevention program for teenagers, and a medical research team conducting drug trials.

The expectations of the grant writer’s institution are pertinent as well. For faculty at major research institutions, success in attracting grant funding often is a key factor in tenure and promotion. In a way, major grant funding functions as verification that a faculty member’s research or innovative project rose to the top among those proposed by other academics. All three influences—the funder, the discipline, and the institution—must be taken into consideration before you begin. It is a good idea to read through a general treatment of grant writing skills for the layperson could have prevented some of these beginner mistakes (Karsh & Fox, 2014).

Online Tool

Take a short course in grant writing through The Foundation Center, available in four different languages, that will guide you through the proposal writing process http://foundationcenter.org/getstarted/tutorials/shortcourse/info.html

Activity 11.6: Thinking Through a Grant Project

Barbara Davis (2005) http://www.mcf.org/system/article_resources/0000/0325/writingagrantproposal.pdf) suggests that grant writers use the following questions to guide them in explaining the details of the project. Try writing a response to each one: Who is the target audience, and how will you involve them in the activity? How many people do you intend to serve? What are you going to do? What project planning has already taken place? Who is going to do the work and what are their credentials? When will the project take place? Where will the project take place? Use your answers to begin drafting a grant proposal (Table 11.6).

Table 11.6

Advice on securing grants