With the First Year Assistant Professor (FYAP) deadline rapidly approaching, I thought I’d take this week’s blog post as an opportunity to describe one of OPD’s core services: proposal editing. While it may seem obvious that a research development office would provide editing services, the value-added prospect may not be as clear.

We focus primarily on the “grantsmanship” aspects of the proposal: things like presentation, structure, readability, and focus, as well as more basic concerns like spelling, grammar, and punctuation. These are all critical components of a successful proposal, but it’s very easy to get so engrossed in writing that you forget about them. This is especially true the longer into the process you get, as it’s human nature to avoid finding fault in our own work. Other times you’ve just seen something so much that you stop seeing the details, and only see the product as a whole.

Some of the questions we ask when editing include:

• Does the proposal follow the formatting instructions in the funding opportunity?
• What is the PI trying to accomplish? What’s the overall goal of the project?
• How is it done currently, and what are the limitations of that?
• What’s new in the PI’s approach, and why do they think it’ll work?
• Why is this important? What difference does it make it the project is successful?
• What are the risks and rewards of the proposed project?
• How much will it cost, how long will it take, and how will the PI make sure that it gets done?
• What are the metrics for success?
• Are all acronyms defined, and are all concepts explained?
• Is it structured like a proposal, and not a publication?
• Is it difficult to read? Are there lots of walls of text and run on sentences?
• Does the PI adequately explain all of their proposed tasks?
• Does the PI make it clear when and where they are addressing the review criteria?

Note on that last question however that OPD does not evaluate how well you’ve addressed the criteria. That’s up to the reviewers. What we try to do is make sure that the proposal has specific statements that are clearly intended to address the questions that the reviewers have to answer. Another question we often get is “How long before the deadline should I send my proposal?” The answer is as soon as possible! The level of detail we can give each proposal is directly related to the amount of time we have. A proposal sent two weeks before the funder’s deadline will get an in-depth review, while one sent 2 days before might just get a basic review. Also keep in mind that you’ll need time to make any revisions as well.

Looking forward to the impending flood of editing requests!