Tag: Advice

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Writing Conversationally and the Plain Style in Grant Proposals and My Master’s Exam

The kinds of skills you learn by grant writing don’t only apply to grant writing.

Loyal Grant Writing Confidential readers know that in my other life I’m a grad student in English Literature at the University of Arizona. Last week I took my MA written exam, which consisted of three questions that I had to answer over a four-hour period—a bit like Isaac’s recommended test for would-be grant writers:

If we ever decide to offer a grant writing credential, we would structure the exam like this: The supplicant will be locked in a windowless room with a computer, a glass of water, one meal and a complex federal RFP. The person will have four hours to complete the needs assessment. If it passes muster, they will get a bathroom break, more water and food and another four hours for the goals/objectives section and so on. At the end of the week, the person will either be dead or a grant writer, at which point we either make them a Department of Education Program Officer (if they’re dead) or give them a pat on the head and a Grant Writing Credential to impress their mothers (if they’ve passed).

Except the University of Arizona lets you eat and drink tea if you want. Given the extreme deadline pressure, the exam demands that people who take it write quickly and succinctly. I e-mailed my answers to one of my academic friends, who replied, “You write so, well, conversationally, that I wonder how academics will view this. I find it refreshing.” Although this is an underhanded compliment if I’ve ever heard one, I take it as a real complement given how many academics succeed by writing impenetrable jargon. And “conversationally” means, “other people can actually understand what you wrote and follow the thread of your argument.”

This is exactly what I do whether completing a written Master’s exam or writing proposals. If you’re a grant writer, you should too. Proposals should be more or less understandable to readers, who probably won’t give you a very good score if they can’t even figure out what you’re trying to say. It might be tempting to follow the old advice, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,” but although that might be a good strategy in arguments about politics in bars where your audience is drunk, it’s not such a good idea in proposals. I’ve spent most of my life trying to communicate clearly, in what Robertson Davies and others call the “plain style,” which means a style that is as short as it can be but no shorter, using words as simple as possible but no simpler.* The goal, above all else, is clarity and comprehensibility. If you’ve spent any time reviewing proposals, you know that an unfortunate number come up short on this metric.

Over the last decade and change, I’ve been trained to write proposals in such a way that any reasonably educated person can understand the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the proposal. This applies even to highly technical research topics, in which we write most of the proposal and include technical content and specifications that our clients provide. You should write proposals like this too. Sure, the academics of the world might raise their noses instead of their glasses to you, but they often don’t make good grant writers anyway. A good proposal should be somewhat conversational. People on average appear to like conversation much more than they like reading sentences skewed my misplaced pretension. If you manage to write in the plain style, people might be so surprised that they even find your work “refreshing.” And “refreshing” in the grant world means “fundable,” which is the final goal of all grant writing.

And, as for the exam—I passed.

* For more on this subject, read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (which I assign to my students every semester) and John Trimble’s Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing , which I’m going to start assigning next semester.

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The Danger Zone: Common RFP Traps

When first looking at a RFP, it is a good idea to remember Robbie the Robot from Lost in Space (the 60’s TV show, not the terrible movie remake) shouting “Danger Will Robinson,”* because when you open a RFP, you’re entering THE DANGER ZONE.

Those innocent looking RFPs are filled with traps. For example, if you are responding to a RFP that was previously issued and you have a proposal from a past submission, you will typically find that the funder has changed the RFP slightly, often in a subtle way. This might be by changing the order of questions, using different headers or outline patterns, requiring a specific font, and the like. Since such changes usually are not substantive, I assume that this is done to trap novice or lazy applicants who just copy the previous proposal and change the date. It may be that program officers are basically bored and have nothing better to do, so they find cheap thrills in this, like rabbits racing across the road in front of a car. So, even if you submitted the same project concept for the same program last year, make sure that you carefully go through the RFP to find these public sector equivalents of “easter eggs”. It’s also a good idea, of course, to update the data, polish your text, and find all those typos that slipped through the last editing process.

Another RFP trap is repetitive questions. It is not unusual to find the same question, more or less, asked several times. Whether this is an intentional trick or an artifact of committee members writing different RFP sections, they can be a real challenge for the grant writer, particularly if there are page limits. So, what to do? If there is room, simply rewrite the first answer over and over again. I know this results in a pretty boring read, but occasionally, such as with some HUD programs, reviewers may only read particular sections. The alternative, which we use when there are space limitations, is to refer back to the original answer (e.g., As noted above in Criterion 1, Section 6.a and Criterion 2, Section 2.c, Citizens for a Better Dubuque has extensive existing referral relationships with the full range of youth providers, which will be utilized to provide project participants with service beyond the project scope. Wow, what a great proposal sentence! Feel free to steal it.). However you handle the problem, never ignore questions, as this practice runs the risk of missing points or having the proposal declared technically deficient and not scored at all.

Sometimes, the RFP asks lots of obtuse questions, but never specifically explicitly asks what you plan to do or how you plan to do it. I know this seems incredible, but the Department of Education, for example, often has RFPs like this. In this case, pick any spot you like and insert the project description (e.g., Within the above context of how the Dubuque After School Enrichment Initiative is articulated with Iowa learning standards, the following describes how academic enrichment services will be delivered:). No, this is not a smiley face, just a colon followed by a closed parenthesis. If I was going to use an emoticon, it would have a frowney face to evoke reading RFPs.

One of my favorite RFP traps is to find different instructions for ordering responses in different parts of the RFP. For example, there may be a series of outlined questions, followed by a series of criteria that ask the same questions, more or less, but in a different order. Since, unlike Schrodinger’s cat, the proposal can only have one “state,” the grant writer has to pick one to follow. Before plunging into the writing, it’s not a bad idea to contact the program officer to raise this conundrum. Unfortunately, even if you are able to find the program officer, your question will usually be met with either giggles or a cold, “read the RFP, it’s all there.” In either case, you’re back to having to pick one of the two orders.

Finally be afraid, be very afraid of RFPs for newly minted programs. This is because the writers of RFPs for new programs usually have no idea what they want from applicants. We’ve been working, for example, on a $8 million proposal being submitted to a California state agency on behalf of a public sector client. The program is new and the RFP is a mess in terms of conflicting guidance, hidden requirements and so on. Since there were some aspects of the RFP that were beyond even our amazing deductive abilities, after leaving several messages over a week, we finally got the program officer on the phone. He sheepishly admitted that they had “forgotten” to include some of the instructions but planned to see what they got in responses and fix the RFP next year. It was good to find an honest man in Sacramento, and we put the submission package together in the most logical manner we could. Hopefully the state agency will straighten out the RFP next year.

We have seen our approach used in subsequent RFPs before, so this is not impossible. We wrote the first HUD YouthBuild proposal funded in Southern California in response to the first funding round in 1993. Not surprisingly, the Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA: HUD-speak for RFP), was a complete nightmare and we had to develop a response format more or less on our own, after a number of unproductive calls to HUD. Fortunately, when the next Youthbuild NOFA was issued, it bore a remarkable resemblance to our submission in terms of how the proposals were to be organized. It is always fun to drag the bureaucracy toward enlightenment, so matter how hard the slog. YouthBuild moved to the Department of Labor in FY 2007, and, yes we successfully made the transition by writing yet another funded YouthBuild proposal last year, bringing our total of funded YouthBuild proposals to a baker’s dozen or so, proving that the funding agency is largely irrelevant to the grant writing process.

* Robbie actually made his screen debut in the wonderful 1956 film Forbidden Planet.

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Evoke The Wonderful Past in Your Needs Assessment

In Umberto Eco’s fabulous The Name of the Rose, Adso of Melk says that “In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head […]” The novel was published in 1980 and is set in 1321.

In Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Black says: “A cleric by the name of Nusret […] had made a name for himself during this period of immorality, inflation, crime, and theft. This hoja, who was from the small town of Erzurum, attributed the catastrophes that had befallen Istanbul in the last ten years […] to our having strayed from the path of the Prophet.” The novel was published in 2001 and is set in the 1590s.

In the HBO show The Wire, a police commissioner—Herb, I think, but trying to remember the characters’ names is like trying to learn Russian—says in episode three or four, “It’s not like it was.” That’s the theme of the entire fifth season, which is set at a newspaper. Given that newspapers and TV news stations laid off about 25% of their staff from 2001 to now, and seen similar circulation declines, it’s definitely not like it was.

All three stories demonstrate beliefs about a superior golden age; we’ve been expelled from the Garden of Eden and the present day is one of monstrous vice, corruption, incompetence, mendacity, bad pop music, dissolute youth, depravity, environmental degradation, inappropriate fashion, and the like. Characters in novels, like their counterparts in nostalgic movies, promote this idea. It’s a narrative assumption that often goes unchallenged in newspapers. It’s such a cultural commonplace that it should be a corollary of Writing Needs Assessments: How to Make It Seem Like the End of the World: argue that the past was often better than the present. We used to live in an age of abundance, happiness, and success. Now we don’t. But if you fund our program, we’ll live happily again. All you need to do is cut the check for the program we’re going to run. Your needs assessment needs appropriate data, of course, but it should also have an overarching story. The fall from a golden age could be one such arc.

Recently, the New York Times quoted Plato in “Generation You vs. Me Revisited“: “’The children now love luxury,’ Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. ‘They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.’” For more than 2,000 years, and probably longer, we’ve been telling ourselves about a past that probably never existed. (Although I should note that the NYT article questions conventional wisdom and the idea that self-absorption can be measured through tests like the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Isaac wrote a post about why self-esteem measurements are silly and used similar reasoning to what’s in the article. The underlying phenomena is similar: it’s very hard to ascertain what people think and feel because the only methods of measurement we have are words and behaviors, which are at best imprecise.)

Back to the main point: the idea of a fall from an ideal state is a very old one—at least as old as the Old Testament and probably older. People like it, so you can claim that you need to operate the program you wish to run as a way of recapturing this past, which is much more wholesome than a degraded present beset by all manner of ills, such as gangs. The worse you can make the present appear, the more you need funding. Then, in activities section (or whatever it happens to be called), you should depict the program you wish to run as a way to return to or surpass this state and create a better vision for the future.

This isn’t the only possible approach; you could also frame the issue by arguing that the past has always been as bad as the present: for generations, the target neighborhood/group/city has been mired in poverty, assailed by outsiders, ignored by the government, and harmed by pernicious societal forces. Now, a program has finally come along to remedy the malady and restore the rightful social order, as one might in a traditional Romance (i.e. one with magical events, ordained heroes, and perilous quests).

Either way, the present isn’t good, and the agency applying will be the knight in shining armor ready to slay the social beast, be it crimes, gangs, teenagers more generally, or a dragon infestation. Many writers include elements of the Wonderful Past unconsciously. We’re giving you permission to make the wonderful past an explicit part of your needs assessment.