Advice for First-Time Grant Application Writers: Visual Considerations

Here I discuss the formatting dos and don’ts of a grant application. These strategies focus on the text-setting and figure-formatting elements for maximizing the readability of your document.

First, you need to accept three things about the referees reading your application:

1. They are impartial. Referees usually don’t know who you are.
2. They are not experts. For the more general grants open to all ideas, referees don’t know the subtleties of your field, and they don’t intend to learn any—that’s because they have a stack of applications to read beside yours.
3. They want to grant you money. Referees look for excuses to grant money with every application. Give them all the excuses you can find (Karsh & Fox, 2019).

That said, let’s start with the formatting don’ts.

A Grant Application Is Not a Research Article

The circled numbers in Figure 1 highlight the grant application don’ts.

① Don’t introduce your proposal with a block of text. You want your referee to remember your introduction immediately; that introduction will serve as the context against which your referee will situate the rest of your application. A block of text is hard to remember. Nobody wants to remember a block of text.

② Don’t highlight words with a combination of features. If you bold and underline a title, you won’t be able to use either bold, or underline independently for a different purpose elsewhere, because they will be less distinct.

③ Don’t use complex figures to illustrate the complexities of the concept behind your proposal. Complex anything should be made simple. If your figure is itself complex you are doing it wrong.

④ Don’t remove spaces between paragraphs. Lack of space means high text density, which means low readability.

⑤ Don’t rely on references (red letters in Figure 1). If you need references to illustrate your statements you are doing it wrong; referees don’t have time to check them. Strings of references tell referees you are writing an article instead of a grant application (i.e., you don’t know what you’re doing).

⑥ Don’t submit figureless pages. Figures are spaces with information. No figure means high text density, which means low readability.

⑦ Don’t use justified alignment. This alignment maximizes text density.

⑧ Don’t use too many references, especially when writing short applications. A list of references that takes up too much space says you don’t know how to present your own ideas independently.

A Grant Application Is a Poster/Elevator Pitch

Visually, a grant application uses the non-verbal components of a poster to help text convey its ideas. When these components are used right, they enable referees to focus on the content (the elevator pitch). This in itself is an excuse to award the grant from the referees’ perspective.

The circled numbers in Figure 2 highlight the grant application dos.

① Do introduce/summarize your proposal with a large figure. This approach aims to give referees a solid, memorable context as they go on to the more detailed sections.

② Do use bold, single underline, and italics separately for different purposes. Avoid other features such as double and curly underlines.

③ Do use a figure to give the broad strokes of your story. State the big-picture problem you’re trying to solve, the specific aspect you want to look at, and the specific steps you plan to take. Use text as figure caption to give referees details where necessary.

④ Do use space to delineate paragraphs. Well used spaces mean readability.

⑤ Do use references with purpose. One Science or Nature reference to illustrate a key concept? Yes. One reference to show your lab has the capability to perform the task? Yes. Three references to demonstrate many groups had used different approaches but couldn’t get a reasonable answer? No.

⑥ Do include at least one figure per page. If illustrating the concept of the proposal, make sure to give only the broad stroke. Otherwise, illustrating how your measurements will happen in practice also works.

⑦ Do left-justify your paragraphs. Left justification naturally adds space. You know what follows.

⑧ Do use the appropriate number of references (minimal). Choose references with informative titles—anything that helps the referee is a good thing. Seeing few references tells referees you know how to cut off unnecessary information.

Works Consulted

Karsh, E., & Fox, A. S. (2019). The Only Grant Writing Book You’ll Ever Need (Fifth). Hachette Book Groups.