The NSF CAREER Toolkit

Yearly, ORDE develops a toolkit for those PIs applying for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program or CAREER program. Below is a snippet and you can find the full toolkit here.

CAREER AWARD PURPOSE AND BACKGROUND
All NSF directorates participate in the CAREER Program, designed to support junior faculty in their dual roles as teacher-scholars. CAREER Awards provide recipients the opportunity to enhance their professional career development, better integrate their research and education responsibilities, and build academic leadership abilities. While all NSF directorates make CAREER Awards, the number of awards varies significantly by directorate (see Appendix A, NSF CAREER Awards by Directorate, page 9).

This year NSF is only offering one deadline – JULY 27, 2020 – for the CAREER Program across all the Directorates in contrast to previous years that featured multiple deadlines to accommodate proposal traffic on the online proposal submission system. Beyond 2020, the CAREER deadline is set for the fourth Monday of July.

Three areas emphasized by NSF program officers and CAREER awardees are:

·        Begin work on a CAREER Award proposal early. This is a very competitive program; NSF is estimating it will make just 500 new and continuing CAREER awards per year during the timeframe this announcement is open. It is also unlike any other proposal you will submit to NSF because it involves planning your career objectives and illustrating how the CAREER Award will contribute to your professional development over the next 5, 10, and 20 years.

·        CAREER Awards represent a true balance between your faculty research and education roles. The required educational component may focus on any level: K-12 students, undergraduates, graduate students, and/or the general public. When planning this component, design innovative outreach efforts that go well beyond what you normally do in your faculty role.

·        Partnerships, especially industrial partnerships, are considered a positive aspect, but keep in mind that no co-principal investigators are allowed on CAREER proposals (see discussion under Budget Details on page 5). International collaborations are also encouraged.

Resources:
CAREER Toolkit - ORDE
CAREER Website - NSF
CAREER Program Solicitation - NSF

Making your grant proposal smooth 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

Targeting your grant pitch

I've blogged before about how you make a clear and compelling case in your grant proposal, but this week I want to highlight the importance of targeting and speaking to a particular agency in your grant proposal. Oftentimes, PIs submit their same research project to several different funding agencies, which is fantastic and a savvy move in our competitive grants climate. However, where those same researchers go wrong is when they cut and paste one proposal into a template for another with very little customization.

Brian Buma, an Assistant Professor in Integrative Biology at CU Denver, highlighted at our Grant Writing Symposium last week the importance of this customization. Below are a few tips for targeting an agency with your proposal:

Do your homework: Read and re-read the program announcement, but also the agency mission, strategic plan, annual report, etc. Get to know the agency and the type of work in which they're investing.

Know your reviewers: Make sure you know who will be ultimately reviewing your proposal. How broad is the review panel? Does it include laypeople? This will give you a better sense of to whom you're writing.

Talk to a Program Officer: The PO is the liaison for the agency, and no one can give you a better glimpse into what the agency is looking to fund. So, reach out early and often to see if your project and pitch are a good fit.

Dr. Buma shared the hook he used for different agencies that were essentially pitching the same research project in customized ways to speak to the agency. Here were those examples:

National Geographic: "We will tell the story of the world's southernmost forests, a region never before explored and a compelling example of a wild landscape on the edge of human experience."

National Science Foundation: "We will test theories related to climate change in the southern hemisphere and provide a new reference point in a geographically under-sampled region, reducing the need to spatially extrapolate current ecosystem projections."

US Forest Service: "We will better understand, and be able to predict, the impact of climate change on forest growth and health by setting up long-term monitoring plots in this region, which has not been done prior."

Local Government: "We will build local knowledge and enable better access to the region by establishing long-term monitoring plots and sharing those results with the community directly via town hall meetings."

Even if you don't know much about the agencies above, it's clear to see that Dr. Buma is focusing his pitch on what he knows each agency is interested in. National Geographic is a popular magazine, so they want the story of the research. The NSF is interested in furthering scientific fields. The US Forest Service wants to fund work that preserves forests, and local government groups are interested in community relations.

So, before you start cutting and pasting your project verbiage into a new agency template, make sure you're pitching to that agency's needs and interests.

Resources:
Turning Your Research Idea Into a Proposal Worth Funding - Salmaan Kanji
Crafting a Sales Pitch for Your Grant Proposal - Robert Porter

What's in a name? Titling your grant proposal

Pardon my cliché title, but since this is a blog, I just cannot help myself with some of my dubiously clever titles! However, I do think that this gives us an example of a title that makes sense for a blog, but the tone of which would not be appropriate for a grant proposal.

Here is why. As I consider my blog title(s), I first think about you, my audience. I assume that you are faculty researchers, mainly at the CU Denver and Anschutz Medical Campuses. I assume that you are busy and are looking for some strategies and tips to improve your grant development and/or honing your research projects to appeal to funders. When this title pops up in your RSS feed, I'm trying to communicate two things to you.

1. That this won't be a horribly boring or overly technical blog post through my initial overused Shakespearean pun.
2. That this blog is about grant titling through the latter half of the title

For those of you who would like "just the facts ma'am," and are not interested in the background information, you have likely skipped to the tips at the very bottom. For those of you who are reading the whole thing, I take you on my brief mental journey to illustrate the very process to use in creating a title for your grant proposal.

So, your grant and its title is for your peer reviewers. Who are they? What environment are they reading in? And, what is their goal in reading your grant application?

Who: Usually other faculty researchers, but not necessarily if you are applying to a private foundation

Environment: When they find a spare moment in the day or on the plane ride out to the review session they are trying to get through all the grants they have been assigned

Goal: Understand all the grants they have been assigned to make a decision on which to support

Now, as you see, entertainment or deeply contemplating new phraseology is not what reviewers are looking for, so we must develop titles that best facilitate the goals of our audience. Grant titles should be concise and descriptive. These two words might seem in opposition, but it really just means, every word has to count and we have to choose the title that best gives an understanding of what is most important in our grant.

In addition to always rooting yourself in your reader's needs and interests when making writing decisions, below are some quick tips for grant titling:

ORDE's Titling Tips:

• Review titles of funded projects by your sponsor (warning: do not assume these titles are the best, but consider your impression of the project based on the title)
• Be original and relevant (look up the hot language used by the sponsor and see if it fits with your concept)
• Be accurate and use agency-friendly keywords
• Use results/impact-driven words instead of describing a process
• Be authoritative (Questions, although they may seem intriguing can imply yours is an exploratory, risky, or questionable project)
• Only use abbreviations that are understood by the reader (e.g., DNA)
• Use active verbs (e.g., remodeling, reconstructing, creating, etc.)
• Use plain language (remember, get the point across clearly)
• Get feedback from colleagues and your program officer
• Proofread your title along with everything else
• Use the same title in resubmittals so your reviewers know to focus on your changes

These tips can help you sculpt your title into something that can grab your reviewers' attention and give them a crisp snapshot of your project. See below for more tips!

Resources:
Murder Most Foul: How Not to Kill a Grant Application
Research Paper Titles in Literature, Linguistics, and Science: Dimensions of Attraction