Making your proposal easy reading

I've been reviewing some writing recently and found myself making edits or suggestions around sentence length in some places where sentences went on for three-four lines, but left sentences of the same length alone in other places. This got me thinking, what's happening in those long sentences I let slide that made them easier to read than those I revised? To provide some answers to this question and the broader question of what you can do to make your grant writing easier to read, consider these tips:

Use first person, active voice
I've said this before, but I'll say it again, it is much easier to read writing that is written in the first person (using I and we instead of "the PI" or "the research team"). Of course, there are still granting agencies that frown on use of the first person, so if that is the case, always follow their rules first. But, even if you are forced into third person, you can still use active voice.

Third person, passive voice: The experiment will be conducted by the PI.

Third person, active voice: The PI will conduct the experiment.

First person, active voice: I will conduct the experiment.

You'll notice that not only is the first person, active voice example easier to read, but it's also shorter!

Read it aloud
Many writers/editors work to strike a conversational tone in their work. But, how do you do that? Well, try turning the written word into the spoken word to see how it sounds. Try reading what you have written and revise the turns of phrase that don't roll off the tongue the way they did the pen. And, of course, if you can engage someone else in listening to your talk and get their opinion, you've gone one step further to making your writing conversational.

Avoid big and vague words
Research is often dealing with highly technical or theoretical concepts, and of course, these areas lend themselves to some whopper, super-smart-sounding, words. These five dollar words are fantastic to include in your scholarly articles, but when it comes to grant-writing, they will likely not earn you any bonus points. Consider the reviewer who you send to the dictionary a couple of times. With a stack of grant applications next to them, they probably won't thank you for building their vocabulary and may resent the extra time they spend reading when you should have explained things for them.

One thought = One sentence
Circling back to our original query of why some long sentences are easier to read than others, I think where writers often get into trouble is when they try to put more than one thought in a sentence. Aside from considering the tips above, one thing that makes sentences difficult to read is when they become a list of conjunctive clauses. When you find a sentence that is long, and it's riddled with ands, or it is plum full of ors, but you lose the point of it somewhere along the way, and then the writer shifts ideas, or then they try to bring it back around, but you are already lost, and so...you get the point. That last sentence wasn't much longer than others I've used in this blog, but it just wanders on. Even if you had no trouble following it, you were probably getting a little annoyed. So, try to keep your sentences short, but if you need to get lengthy on a couple, do all you can to keep them readable and focused on one idea.


Resources
3 Quick-and-Easy Tips to Make Your Writing Easier to Read and More Effective - Jen Stevens
Making Your Writing Easy to Read - Cheryl Stevens