Grant-Writing Across Cultures

As a sort of follow-up to our blog on Intercultural Collaboration, I thought I'd dig into how culture can also come into play when it comes to writing.  This can be especially significant when a multi-cultural research team forms and works to write a grant together. Without some foresight on cultural starting points and unspoken writing rule differences amongst members, this can be a frustrating experience. Below are some differences to be aware of...

Linear vs. Spiral Writing
Scholars in western cultures tend to write linearly - where there is a clear beginning, middle, and conclusion to their writing. Not surprisingly, U.S. granting agencies tend to prefer this sort of writing in their grant applications. In some Eastern cultures, scholarly writing has a more spiral nature to it where the writer touches on key points throughout the writing and comes back around to those same points to add on later. Although this is a perfectly acceptable and preferable way to write within these same cultures, to the western scholar and grant reviewer, it can be seen as unfocused or hard to follow.

Directness
To follow on linear vs. spiral writing is this idea of direct writing.  The sense of directness in writing is cultural in much the same as the preference for directness in verbal communication. We discussed the high and low context cultural differences in our Intercultural Collaboration blog post. Western cultures often prefer more direct and literal writing and may perceive indirect writing as flowery or overly verbose. This is important to acknowledge if you hale from an eastern culture but are writing a grant for a western sponsor and grant reviewers. Western readers want to know right away what your grant is about and why it's important and have a lower tolerance for over contextualizing or long stories that finally lead up to what's important about your work. There is also lower tolerance for humility, which may be more valued by eastern readers, but by western readers it may look like a lack of confidence.


Idioms
Lastly, although it may seem obvious, idioms and metaphors that are used by all people to communicate on a daily basis are extremely cultural, and taken out of context make very little sense. When you consider that most idioms are formed based on history, religion, or even politics, it's easy to see how you need to have that sociocultural understanding for an idiom to work. Thus taking idioms across cultures may fail to translate. This is essential for all grant writers to remember. For, even though you may be western, writing a grant for a western sponsor, you should not assume that all of your grant reviewers will have a western cultural orientation. Thus it's dangerous to use idioms in any grant application.

As before, I do not mean to essentialize or over-simplify eastern and western cultures, but instead hope to illuminate some common cultural differences that are often seen in writing to allow grant developers to better navigate those differences to build their competitiveness within the grants world, but also to be able to successfully co-write with researchers from many different cultures.

Resources
Intercultural Written Communication Blog - Ahlam
Cultural Considerations: Rhetoric and Ethics - wikidot
Writing for an International Audience - goodtools.net