How to Write a Competitive Grant Application; or, the Art of Rhetoric for Despairing Academics

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 - you are not addressing your peers nor attempting to advance human understanding (yet). Rather, you are writing a job application, where you must first prove that the job needs to exist, and second, that you are the best person to do that job. This is the argument for which you need to provide evidence - not for the scholarly argument that you will make in the publications arising from the research. This makes a difference to the kind of information you should offer. I will highlight three aspects, which are often misjudged in content and focus: the research question, the state of the art, and the project design.

One key thing to remember is that you will have two kinds of audiences to satisfy; the expert reader, who will know the discipline and who will assess your proposal based on its scientific merit, and the non-specialist reader, who will assess your proposal simply as an intelligible project design with potential. Such people would be, for example, the readers of the B1 document in ERC fellowship applications, but also reviewers for the Leverhulme Trust, or any UK research council. For each section of your application, you need to make sure not only that it makes sense to a non-specialist, but also that it impresses a non-specialist.

1. Research Question/Problem.

There is an easy three-part structure for this: What is the problem in the world that you want to address? How do you think it should be addressed? And what, exactly, are you going to do about it?

a. What is the problem in the world? Since you are also addressing a non-specialist audience, it’s important to start with a problem that exists outside academia. Why does the world need to know more about this topic? Where is there a gap in our knowledge about the world? What value will this new knowledge bring? This doesn’t have to be knowledge with immediate societal impact, but you should be able to explain why your research is worth knowing about.

b. How should this problem be addressed? For any research question, there are a number of approaches that can be taken to solve it and/or provide useful information that will shed light on it. Which approaches - theories, methodologies, data sets - would you say are the most relevant for this particular question? This is also where you can set out why you should be the person doing this research - why your expertise in particular methodologies, for example, is going to be crucial.

c. What are you going to do about it? The difference between this point and the previous is subtle but important - the previous one is a more conceptual response (why these approaches), whereas this one should consist of a specific programme of activities: what are you going to do to create the new knowledge that you have said is needed. Give an overview of the more detailed research plan that is about to follow.

2. State of the Art:

What does the reader need to know about your field, and its recent trends? Please note that this is not a general question about your discipline, but rather an opportunity to give an account of your discipline in a way that highlights the need for your project - this is the conclusion to which the State of the Art provides evidence. Which is not to say, of course, that you should twist the history of your discipline to only involve research that supports your work, but rather that you need not discuss everything that has ever been done, or everything that is currently being done. This is potentially a vast question, so keeping focused on the end goal is important - where does your project fit in the wider discipline? How does it fill gaps in current knowledge?

All sections of your application need to be addressed to a lay reader as well as a specialist, but with State of the Art, it is particularly crucial to maintain the balance between intelligibility and accuracy. Your assessment of current research needs to be something that a specialist in your field would accept, but also it needs to make sense to someone who knows nothing about your field. Imagine to that you are explaining it to an engineer/historian/economist (delete as appropriate). What would they need to know about your field to understand your project?

3. Project design.

Your project design needs to be structured along a specific trajectory: research questions - research activities - results. This kind of project design will be more familiar to researchers from the hard and social sciences, and less so in arts and humanities, but even so the extra effort which humanities scholars will have to make here is worthwhile - evidence shows that writing grant proposals is good for your research practice. Moreover, no-one will give you grant money if your plan is simply to think about some stuff and then write it down.

a. Research questions. You will have explained earlier why these questions are necessary, and provided the disciplinary context for them. What you need to do now is to reformulate them in a way that emphasises their project design aspect - specific questions to which answers (however wide-ranging, expansive, or nuanced) are possible. For example, if you research project is concerned with early modern translation practices in certain Italian city states, you will need to define very carefully the questions you must ask in order to gain this information. Which city states, and why these? What is the exact time period you are looking at, and why? Are you looking at publishers, translators? Are you looking at translated texts and comparing them to the original; if so, which texts, which languages, which translators, and why? Are you looking at publishing trends more widely, and if so, what is your methodology? What methodologies are you using: literary textual analysis, historical data collection, comparative philology? Are you applying any current cultural theories? What level of historical contextualisation is necessary to provide accurate information?

b. Research activities. What are you doing to create the new knowledge? These include physical activities: archival research, data collection, interviews - anything that will form the basis of your analysis. It will also include analysis itself. Again, separating such activities will be more familiar for hard and social scientists than humanities scholars, but thinking through the different activities that you will have to undertake (even at so basic a level as data collection and data analysis) will help you plan your time and your work. Crucially, it will demonstrate to the funder that you are capable of planning your time and your work, and therefore able to get the project done in time.

c. Of course, you cannot yet know what kinds of results your research might bring, but you will know what topic you will have created new knowledge about. These results need to be linked to your original research questions: you will have argued earlier that your project is needed to solve a crucial problem, and so your project results should be a clear response to this gap in current research. It need not be a comprehensive or exhaustive answer, but it needs to shed light on the issue and/or indicate the next step forward.

4. One further point which every grant application needs to include is importance: why does this research need doing? Why now? Why by this researcher? It should be the underlying thread throughout your application, but; there is also a danger. That danger is repeating throughout your proposal that your project is really really important, but never explaining why. Do not fall into this trap! Imagine yourself explaining this to the aforementioned engineer/historian/economist - someone outside your field, but an academic - and think: what would they need to know in order to be persuaded by the importance of my project?

Final piece of advice: have it reviewed by someone outside your specialism, and especially, by someone who is willing to tell you if it doesn’t make sense and point out your typos. Another pair of eyes is always useful.


Further reading:

* Charles Ayoubi, Michele Pezzoni, and Fabiana Visentin, ‘The important thing is not to win, it is to take part: What if scientists benefit from participating in research grant competitions?’, Research Policy, 48:1 (2019), pp. 84-97.
* https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/10/08/its-not-the-winning-but-the-taking-part-that-counts-how-the-process-of-applying-for-competitive-grants-is-of-benefit-to-researchers/