Abstract: The Window to Your Proposal

Writing an abstract is hard. I have read many an abstract for scholarly articles and for grant proposals, those for grant proposals tend to be worse than those for articles. I attribute this to experience. Most researchers have written more scholarly articles than they've written grant proposals. They've certainly read more articles than proposals. But, I also think part of the problem is that we don't often think about how these abstracts should differ. Other scholars use publication abstracts to get a gist of what the article is about to decide if they want to read the entire article. Grant reviewers read an abstract slightly differently. Their question going into the proposal isn't really, "Do I want to read this proposal?" but more "What does this PI want to do and why?"

Unlike in an article, you do not have results yet. Whereas describing your results in a publication abstract is important, in a grant proposal, you just want to bring your reviewer up to speed. You want them to understand what you want to do so that they can better navigate and assess your proposal.

Hopefully that's enough to convince you to give your grant abstract some serious thought. To help you with this, I thought I'd identify some dos and don'ts (in reverse order) for your abstract based on the errors and strengths I commonly see in proposal abstracts.

Don't

• Make the intro to your proposal and the abstract the exact same language. Remember, the reviewer who just read your abstract will now start reading the body of your proposal. It looks sloppy if you just do a cut and paste, even if it's using brilliant prose
• Give extraneous details/examples: remember you don't have much room. Make every word count
• Include an equation: Even if it's the key to your entire project, an equation cannot be fully explained in an abstract to justify its use
• Use jargon/excessive acronyms: Remember, even if your proposal has to be very technical, the abstract should still be understandable by the layperson

Do

• Describe the problem you're trying to address and how bad it is
• Give a summary of your project and your goals
• Include your hypothesis
• Describe what's been done / note preliminary results
• Show how your project will help solve the problem
• Follow any guidelines that the agency offers for abstracts

Resources

How to Write a Compelling Grant Abstract - Elena Kallestinova (Yale)

Crafting a sales pitch for your grant proposal - Robert Porter