The Rhetoric and Argumentation of Research Funding

Producing a competitive grant application is as much a question of effective writing as of excellent science. ( NB: I say competitive rather than successful. Success cannot be guaranteed, but competitiveness can be achieved.) A good funding application is based on answering the right questions: what is the research problem that you are going to tackle? Why is this a problem worth tackling? And how does your project go from a set of research questions to a plausible set of answers to those questions - what strategies of inquiry, analysis, methodology, or knowledge production do you need in order to come up with those answers? The science underpinning the proposal must be excellent, of course, but it exists on a different plane from the articulation of the project. Let us move it aside for the moment. The questions you need to answer should be  familiar from writing academic publications. However, the point of the argument is different. A grant application is not a research paper ...