Writing Tips

Proposal Writing Tips

General Tips

  • Read the sponsor guidelines and decide the best way to present your project so that it meets your needs and the sponsor’s objectives.

  • Gather your background/supporting data and information.

  • Outline/draft your project according to the guidelines, including formatting rules and the placement of sections where the reviewers expect to find them.
  • Draft a proposal that reflects your enthusiasm and commitment to the project, is clear and concise, well organized, and that uses few abbreviations and acronyms.
  • Ask Sponsored Research, colleagues, friends, and collaborators to read your draft, make sure it follows the funding agency’s guidelines, and annotate it with comments and queries.
  • Revise the draft as needed.
  • Ask Sponsored Research, colleagues, friends, and collaborators to proofread your revisions and make additional comments.
  • Ensure good physical appearance on final copy--clean type, white space, headings, margins, etc., as appropriate

Important considerations

The Office of Sponsored Research is happy to give your proposal a critical review throughout the process, but as many people as possible should read your proposal and give you critical feedback before it goes out.  When you finish a draft, circulate it to your readers, giving them enough lead time to give it a good read. It may be helpful to give your readers a deadline so that you have enough time to revise readers, based on their comments. Some proposers find that tools such as Google Docs or a shared folder in Dropbox facilitates the feedback process.

You have one chance to make your first impression with the reviewers. The abstract/summary and the introductory section should be perfect and should grab the reviewers' attention.  If your friends/colleagues can only review limited portions of your proposal before submission, these should be the sections they read.

The reviewers are not necessarily experts in your field and may be reading your proposal on the check-out line in the grocery store.  Take this into account when you're writing.

Please begin communication with the Office of Sponsored Research when you decide to prepare a proposal and well before the deadline