Research Fellowships Offered by the Research Development & Complaince Office

During the year, applications are invited from UND faculty for research fellowships ($1,000 each) to facilitate writing proposals for external funding of their research and scholarly activities.  Offered through the Research Development and Compliance Office (RD&C) and the University Writing Program, a limited number of faculty in teams of two (faculty proposal writer and mentor) will engage in a 10-session (one hour each) writing seminar.  The goal of the seminar will be for each faculty writer to complete a research proposal, with the assistance of a mentor, that will be suitable for submission to an external sponsor.  If you are interested in this program, contact the Research Development & Complaince Office at (701) 777-4278 or visit their website at http://www.und.edu/dept/rdc/.

How to Write a Proposal

A proposal is essentially a persuasive essay.  You are trying to persuade a sponsor to spend their research dollars on your proposal above all others.  Keep in mind the general rules for persuasive writing while you are drafting your proposal:

• Peer review is one of your greatest assets. Contact a senior or funded member of your department and ask them to read your proposal.
• Unless the solicitation forbids it (and some do) it is perfectly acceptable for you to contact the program manager and make sure your proposal is a good fit for them. If it is not, they may point you in another direction.
• Legibility is important. Use the largest font size you can. The best font (and one that some agencies require) is Arial/Helvetica. Twelve point is best but you can get away with eleven.
• Be Concise! Don’t use ten words to say what you can in five.
• Use the active voice in your writing. Keep it interesting and conversational. You want the reviewer to come away excited about your idea, not feeling like they just attended a ten hour lecture directly after an international flight.
• While good persuasive writing will address the potential flaws in an argument or direction, it should also explain why you will be able to avoid those pitfalls. Be assertive in your ideas while still acknowledging room for debate and the value of other opinions.
• Don’t use jargon or, if you need to, explain it the first time you use it. While your reviewers will be experts, not all of them will necessarily be experts in your specific field.
• The most important part of your proposal is actually not the project narrative. It is the summary. The majority of reviewers in a crowded panel arrive having only read your summary and rely on your primary reviewers to enlighten them on the project as a whole. Anyone picking up your summary should be able to understand why your project is more important that any one else’s. This is also the part of the proposal that will become part of the public record, so avoid jargon and do not include any confidential or proprietary information.
• FOLLOW THE SPONSOR GUIDELINES!! This cannot be said enough. Failure to follow the formatting and limitations imposed by the sponsor can result in the return of your proposal without review.
• Last, but definitely not least, always have others, whether they are in your department or not, read and edit your proposal. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation are important. If you misspell a word that could have been caught by spell check or another set of human eyes it is going to stand out like a sore thumb. It’s easy to fall in love with our own words and lose perspective while writing something we believe in. Another set of eyes can help spot wordiness where the author may see a cunning turn of phrase. If you ask your GCS specialist and are able to get your proposal to us with enough lead time, they will be happy to provide some editing and a pair of layman’s eyes.

Listed below are a variety of on-line resources to assist you with your proposal writing:

Non-Profit Guides
This is a free web-based grant-writing site offereing tools for established non-profit organizations, charitable, educational, public organizations, and other community-minded groups through the grant-writing process.

A Guide for Proposal Planning and Writing
This publication is an excellent free resource for new grant-writers This resource is written by Jeremy T. Miner and Lynn E. Miner.

A Guide to Proposal Writing
National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education, 1998.

A Practical Guide for Writing Proposals
A resource written by Alice N. T. Reid.

Developing and Writing Grant Proposals
A resource from the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance

EPA Grant-Writing Tutorial
A resource from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This interactive software tool walks you through the grant-writing process and helps you to learn to write more competitive grants.

All About Grants Tutorial
A resource from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and NIAID featuring tutorials to help biomedical investigators, especially new ones, plan, write, and apply for the basic NIH research project grant, the R01. This advice comes from the experience of NIAID staff, including former NIH grantees, and should be considered as opinion only. Differing opinions may exist.

General Guidance
A resource from the J. C. Downing Foundation that offers practical tips that can help grantseekers increase their chances for a successful application with any foundation.

How to Improve your Score When Submitting a Grant Proposal
Written by Dr. David Hemenway. This commentary discusses how you can improve your priority score by 50 to 100 points or more. It is based on factors totally unrelated to the science of your proposal but which will definitely cause your priority score to deteriorate unless you pay heed to the items listed. Ignore them if you like, but it will still impact (negatively) on your priority score.

Proposal Writing: The Business of Science
This guide, written by Wendy Sanders and provided by the Whitaker Foundation, discusses how to obtain a NIH grant, including a look at the NIH review system.

Proposal Writing Short Course
The Foundation Center has summarized the steps to writing a proposal.

Some Tips for Writing Grant Proposals
A resource written by Jan Harrington, National Science Foundation, October 2000.

The Original How to Write a Research Grant Application
This resource by the National Institutes of Health, May 2002 takes you through the PHS 398 forms and shows how to respond to events after application. You can review the original tutorial, and other tutorials as well through this site.

Writing from the Winner's Circle: A Guide to Preparing Competitive Grant Proposals
Written by Dr. David Stanley, was published by Nebraska EPSCoR in 1996 to assist researchers in Nebraska (and other states) as they develop grant proposals.