Betty Lai's new book The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars helped me. She shares a way to brainstorm the significance and broader impact of a study.
On a bad day, it's hard for me to believe in my work, so the exercise saved me.
Lai borrows it from researcher Emily Lattie. Ask, "What is the outcome of this work? And if everything goes well, what's the biggest potential impact of that outcome? And if that outcome happened, what's the biggest impact of that outcome?" (p. 53).
Lai's book offers many examples for NIH proposals and Specific Aims, but I also found it helpful for the internal grants I was applying for in migration studies and nursing.
Another helpful guide: Paul J. Silva's How to Write a Lot.
The book mainly tells you how to fall into a writing routine, but it also offers a checklist for writing grants.
I met with my advisors for their personal tips. I circulated drafts among colleagues in my field. I asked friends who didn't know much about my research to read my proposals; it helped to have "new eyes" reviewing earlier drafts. To write better, I even experimented with figures of speech after finding examples from Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence. (Not all of them landed, and I also learned and re-learned to emphasize and to signpost parts of my grants with headings, language from the call for proposals, bold, underline.) I submitted applications a few days early if I could.
Writing grants helped me finish my dissertation proposal. I would write a draft, then I would have a tangible and concrete version of my ideas to workshop with my advisors. They gave me feedback, and then I got to clarify my ideas.
Thankfully, I earned the Turner Schulman Graduate Research Fellowship from Penn's Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration and a pilot grant from the School of Nursing's Office of Nursing Research.
I got a few rejections. Some came without any notification or communication of rejection whatsoever. Suspenseful.
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