4 tricks you CAN use to save space in your proposal

It was probably unfair of me to give you a bunch of space-saving tricks last week and tell you not to use any of them, so I thought this week I should dig into some that you can use...

Use active, first-person voice:
Scholars and researchers are often trained to use the passive, third-person in their academic writing.

Here's the difference:
Passive, third-person: The experiment will be conducted by the researcher.
Active, first-person: I will do the experiment.

Why do academics want to use the passive, third person? A couple of reasons: first, it alludes to the objectivity of the research and removes the researcher from the written proposal. Second, it sounds more formal, more appropriate for the expert reviewers. But, I argue that the benefits of the active, first-person outweigh those of the former. First off, it's shorter. I cheated a little bit in my example and changed the verb, but either way, it's going to end up shorter. And when you make these changes to all of your sentences, you'll save a lot of space! Second, active, first-person is easier to read. Any good technical writer worth her word processor will tell you that!

Remove hyperbole:
I recently reviewed a grant proposal where the PI described something as "very, very important." Now, I get that it's hard in a grant proposal to really make things stand out, but this is not the way! Firstly, my loyal blog readers have heard me say this before, but I once had a Technical Writing Professor who said that there is never a good reason to use the word "very," and she had long since banned it from her writing. Her point was that it didn't add anything to the sentence. If something is important, say "it's important." Adding "very," let alone, two of them doesn't articulate anything significantly different. Now, I'll take this a step further even and suggest that not only should our PI cut out the "verys," but I would ask, is there a way you can show that this is important instead of just saying it? Is there a way to structure the description to make it clear to the reader that this is important, so that you don't have to tell them? Now, I've made this argument and lost several times before and I acquiesce that sometimes using this hyperbole cues the reader to pay close attention. So, if you must, say something is important or great or incredible, but please don't say it's very incredible.

Cut sentences that don't have a clear purpose:
I mentioned this last week, but when you're running out of space in your grant proposal, you need to be brutal. This means going through the proposal line by line, and cutting sentences or phrases that aren't really making a difference. They may be eloquent, they may be poetic, but if they're not doing the work of making your case to reviewers, they have to go!

Phone a friend:
So, after you've changed everything to active, first-person, cut out hyperbole, and brutally curtailed your proposal and you still can't find enough room for your amazing diagram (that you're keeping at a size that reviewers can see), it's time to call for reinforcements. You need to find a colleague to go through and tell you what's still in your proposal that isn't necessary and where you can condense.

These tips can help you cull a mostly-written proposal, but another thing to do is create a well-organized plan of attack before you start writing your grant proposal. If you can outline and identify what you want to do in each section first, it'll help you stay out of the weeds in your first draft. That way there will be less you need to cut later on!

Resources:
Top three things to cut from your writing - Kyra Thomsen