In The Millions, Guy Patrick Cunningham* says that:
More and more, I read in pieces. So do you. Digital media, in all its forms, is fragmentary. Even the longest stretches of text online are broken up with hyperlinks or other interactive elements (or even ads).
More and more, people are also writing in pieces. This isn’t intrinsically bad—this blog is a blog and not a book—but it is the kind of thing you should be cognizant of, because grant writing embodies the opposite tendencies: it’s about long-form, deliberate writing and cohesion. It rewards people who can sit down, focus on a long block of text, and emerge hours later with a coherent set of pages that string similar themes together, almost novelistically. Grant writing it closer to War and Peace than to, say, blogging.
I, like a lot of people, have become aware of the dangers posed by Internet distractions. And I’m more aware when I’m working on a proposal, since the temptation to open Firefox for non-research purposes is always there. It can be done in a second. And then I’m out of the zone for fifteen minutes or more. Furthermore, because of the need to write needs assessments, I can’t simply turn off the Internet altogether (as I can when I’m writing other long-form material).
Still: lots of us are being pulled in too many intellectual directions. We’re reading in “pieces,” or in fragments. But if we’re going to write effective proposals, we have to do the opposite: read in large wholes, and write that way too. The best proposals often have an almost novelistic sense of interwoven themes.
The rest of Cunningham’s essay discusses literature, but the point about the fragmentation of writing—and, by extension, attention—is one that grant writers and would-be grant writers should heed. Governments and foundations aren’t known for being in the vanguard of progress. They aren’t demanding written material in fragments. No RFP has asked that applicants respond via Twitter.
Be ready to write long and coherently.
* Which would a great name for a detective or fantasy hero.
While I appreciate the sentiment about writing long and coherently, more and more foundations are electing to use on-line applications which can have strict word (or character) limits. The challenge becomes keeping your answers terse, succinct and cogent while still trying to be compelling.
yes – agreed – but i see no recent evidence that the readers of submitted federal e-grants are at all constrained by reading the long form and seeking coherence; they aer paid a pittance andfd seem to be easily persuaded by drivel
I see this a lot with new (and younger) staff. The concept of writing novelistically for grants and reports is foreign and I find myself spending a lot of time doing composition 101 with them. I also really appreciate your comments about grant writers reading at length too. You are so right, I often just read long enough to get the stat I was looking for to insert into my grant!
Agree with both commentors. My least favorite part of grant writing is feeling like I’m throwing the proposal into a black box; I usually have no idea who the reviewers are or what credentials they have, much less how closely they are reading the text. But I agree with Jake that we have to keep writing as if our reviewers were the intelligent, critical readers we wish we had. Telling a true story is always a challenge, and makes for more compelling reading.
WRT the above comments about foreshortened application formats, as a government evaluator in such solicitations, your amazement is paralleled with my frequent shock at the poor statistical methods used in compiling the evaluation results. The unfortunate aspect of such solicitations that aren’t obvious is that the evaluation methods are open statistical biasing if not overt poisoning the well via aggressive negative or positive commentary or numerical evaluation submissions.
The best approach to such cattle-auction solicitations, asides from complete avoidance, is to work with the funding agency before the solicitation and establish a more direct relationship with the agency. They might find a reason to review your application post solicitation, if it has been passed over, if they feel that your offer actually presents value which the solicitation failed to evaluate properly.
On the other hand, such familiarity might convince you that they are definitely not worth supporting in any case, as if they muck up solicitations, then they probably also muck up administration.
One more recommendation about lengthy applications: make sure the numbers are consistent with the write up. Things like principal investigators working 3000 hrs/yr and teaching class don’t tell a good story about the risks involved in a proposal. Cost proposals that don’t add up or contradict the text indicate that the work simply won’t get done.
Having several writers doing separate sections of the proposal, and then another doing the cost estimates leads inexorably towards disaster in this regard. It also gives a hitherto prejudiced reviewer an easy method for evaluating your proposal as “cost unrealistic” or whatever unappealable sentence of death the solicitation has within its legal fine print.