Advice about Preparing a Proposal

Here is some advice you didn't ask for and you needn't heed, but may find useful nonetheless.

When writing your proposal, please bear in mind the following:

1. The best way to improve the quality of your writing is by rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. Every good writer knows this. Allow time for your drafts to be reviewed by colleagues and then revised.

2. Seek clarity of thought and expression! If a reviewer doesn't understand your ideas or writing, you will have problems. When a reviewer becomes confused by a proposal, they conclude that the proposal is confusing. (Seldom do they conclude that they are not smart enough to understand the brilliant ideas before them.) Take full responsibility for bringing your readers along with you.

3. Get to the point early in the proposal and stick to it. If a reader doesn't know what YOUR proposal is about by the end of page one, you may have already lost that reviewer. Better still, explain the main purposes of your project in the first paragraph.

4. Consistency may be a hobgoblin in some contexts, but it is essential in a proposal. Once you've laid out your main ideas and objectives, be absolutely certain to stick to them. A fifteen-page proposal is no place for your ideas to develop. They should be fully mature at the outset. A trick for accomplishing this is to try moving the final paragraph of an early draft to the first paragraph of a subsequent draft.

5. Work first and hardest on your conceptual framework, research questions, and work plan, striving for the best possible fit among your intellectual objectives and the means proposed for achieving them. Then use the literature review to indicate what is known about the problem you've framed and its place in the field. In the final proposal the literature review may come before the conceptualization, research questions, and work plan, but in your thinking give priority to the gist of your proposal.

6. Try to resist the urge to overstate your case and overpromise about the work you can accomplish. Most reviewers are experienced researchers and will make sensible assessments of both, so they will feel reassured to learn that you've also made sensible judgments on these matters.

7. Be aware that your proposal will be read by two sorts of reviewers, specialists in your area and specialists in other areas. The first group will evaluate the specific details of the work proposed, while the second will ask how it stacks up in comparison with very different sorts of STS scholarship. So don't assume too much familiarity with the arcane concerns of your specialty, and do explain how your work will contribute to the field of Science and Technology Studies.

Read and follow the (In Revision) NSF 95-92 STS Program Announcement and the GPG Grant Proposal Guide and follow their guidelines. The page length and format of proposals is taken very seriously by the Proposal Processing Unit, so proposals that deviate significantly from these guidelines may not make it upstairs to the program. Similarly, the proposal topic and the type and amount of support requested should fit within the program guidelines.