These three short guides provide insight into making a successful grant or dissertation proposal.
The first is a three-page primer from The Graduate, the newsletter of the Graduate Division at the University of California Berkeley. This is a good guide for the most basic of questions.
How are you uniquely qualified to do this work? Tell the reviewers about your background. How did you get interested in this project? What related work have you done? Depending on the requirements of the funding agency, you may simply submit a curriculum vitae to explain your qualifications, or you may have to write a lengthy personal statement. In a short proposal, such as the one required for the Humanities Graduate Research Grants (now the Humanities and Social Science Research Grants), you may want to include a mention of your background and your qualifications in the statement of purpose.
It also includes information about:
- Getting a Perspective on Need
- Review the Criteria
- What Good Proposals Do
- A Word About Budgets
- Watch Out for Basics
- Try, Try Again
Download and read the entire article here: The Making of a Successful Proposal.
The second is a nine-page guidebook from the Social Sciences Research Council. It provides specific instructions for submitting successful proposals to the SSRC, but the advice may be applicable to other grant-making organizations as well. It aims to shed light on some of the processes a review committee goes through in selecting grantees.
Writing proposals for research funding is a peculiar facet of North American academic culture, and as with all things cultural, its attributes rise only partly into public consciousness. A proposal’s overt function is to persuade a committee of scholars that the project shines with the three kinds of merit all disciplines value, namely, conceptual innovation, methodological rigor, and rich, substantive content. But to make these points stick, a proposal writer needs a feel for the unspoken customs, norms, and needs that govern the selection process itself. These are not really as arcane or ritualistic as one might suspect. For the most part, these customs arise from the committee’s efforts to deal in good faith with its own problems: incomprehension among disciplines, work overload, and the problem of equitably judging proposals that reflect unlike social and academic circumstances.
This guidebook includes sections on how to:
- Capture the Reviewer’s Attention
- Aim for Clarity
- Establish the Context
- What’s the Payoff
- Use a Fresh Approach
- Describe Your Methodology
- Specify Your Objectives
- Final Note
Download and read the entire guidebook: The Art of Writing Proposals: Some Candid Suggestions for Applicants to Social Science Research Council Competitions.
The third is a more in-depth twelve-page guide from the Institute of International Studies at UC-Berkeley. Again, it is geared towards dissertation proposals, but also included in UC-Berekely’s grant writing guide materials. The author, Micahel Watts, starts by pointing out how hard it is to find guidance on this topic. He then lays some out in very systematic fashion.
It is interesting to reflect on why the research proposal, and research design, has become a sort of public secret on campuses and indeed why it has become less an object of scrutiny in the last couple of decades. Perhaps the post-structural skepticism to toward method and ‘truth’, and the attraction of the conditions under which knowledge is produced has contributed to a sort of flight from research design. While an important consideration, I want to use this opportunity to introduce a number of issues pertaining to research design and proposal writing and to lay out in broad terms a number of concerns and knotty problems that enter into the long and complicated process of framing, designing and conducting a researchable [sic] project.
The paper includes information on:
- The Funding Regime: Selection Criteria and Processes
- Primary Objectives and Parameters
- Entry Points and Using Evidence
- Warnings, Pathologies, and Conclusions
Download and read the entire paper: The Holy Grail: In Pursuit of the Dissertation Proposal