Once you’ve found a grant to apply to, you’ll need to write a grant proposal or abstract to win the grant. Proposals are submitted to grantors, who typically award funding based on how you present your research in your proposal.
Grant proposals are unique genres of academic writing. Just as academic genres like conference proposals, conference papers, and journal manuscripts have their own specific generic conventions, grant proposals have unique conventions as well.
Of course, the exact shape of each grant proposal will depend on your discipline and the guidelines given by the grantors. Social science, natural science, and humanities grants have unique twists on grant proposals, so you should familiarize yourself with your discipline’s grant conventions by talking to colleagues in your department. Obviously, you should follow the word limit, formatting, and any other specifications listed in the grant guidelines as closely as possible. The specific guidelines you receive for each grant should trump any other inclinations you have to approaching the proposal.
But despite the inevitable uniqueness of each grant application, here are basic guidelines to follow when writing grants in most disciplines.
Most grants typically follow a pattern:
- An introduction in which you state your topic
- The problem your research seeks to answer, and your hypothesis
- A background section in which you review prior relevant academic literature on your topic or research problem
- A methodology section, in which you lay out the steps you will take to gather data that answer your research question
- A researcher bio, in which you describe your qualifications to undertake the proposed research
- A budget to justify the funding you are requesting
- And a statement of the broader impacts your research will have within your discipline, or for the public at large
Often your introduction, in which you state the topic and your research problem, will work together with your background section to form a “gap statement.” Typically grant writers begin the grant with an observation about the conventional wisdom or current state of knowledge in your field. But then they transition to a gap or a mystery that has yet to be solved. For ex: “Currently x-ray technology is used to solve X, Y, Z problems, but a successful application for Q problem has not yet been demonstrated.”
Identifying a gap early in your grant allows you to position your research problem as a solution to the gap in knowledge. You can then smoothly transition into your hypothesis as a potential answer to solve the gap.
This grant writing strategy implicitly lays out the stakes of your project. Grantors likely understand the inherent value in filling a gap in the field. After all, if they didn’t care about increasing the knowledge about a topic, they wouldn’t be distributing research grants.
Don’t be afraid to make the implicit value of your project explicit. While a gap statement will likely make a powerful argument for your project, you should also feel comfortable making the stakes of filling the gap explicit to entice your readers.
Nevertheless, a clearly defined gap and research problem are not enough to receive a grant, even if grantors see the value of filling the gap. While gap statements and research problems are important to get readers interested in the stakes of your project, they do not necessarily mean your project is worth investing in.
Your grant also needs to be researchable and answerable in the time allowed by the grant. Even if you gap is important to fill, if it would take years to solve or be impossible to answer, the grant will not be successful.
Many successful grant writers rely on the SMART acronym to ensure that their projects are doable.
SMART stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time bound
Having specific parameters for the project (for ex: Whom will you interview? What do you want to get out of your interviews? How do you know they will talk to you? How many interviews must you do?) will go a long way to making your grant proposal seem more realistic and answerable and thus more likely to be approved.
Similarly, it is important that you develop some metric for measuring the success or failure of your project. In the social sciences, this is related to the idea of operationalization, or turning abstract ideas into measurable data points (for ex: developing a coding system to measure “charisma” for a psychology project). While operationalization is a social science concept, the idea can apply to other fields. The important part is to turn as many vague, abstract ideas into measurable issues that you can collect data on. Again, this will make the project seem measurable and doable.
Using SMART principles in your methodology section will help you justify why your project takes the shape it does. It will also go a long way to show that the project is serious and can be completed, not a vague wish to answer a gap.
Using a gap statement, a research problem, and SMART methodology to show the feasibility of your project will serve you well in almost any discipline when writing a grant.
Of course if you have more concerns, don’t be afraid to contact the grantors themselves to ask question.
And certainly feel free to stop by the GC writing center for more help.
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