You may be wondering – like many researchers – how in the world am I going to fit all that data into the 12 pages required by the new grant format?

One key is to tell a story.  That is more vital now than ever.  By telling a story of what you want to do, how you want to do it, and why you are the right person to do it, you don’t need a long list of facts about your work.

If you want to learn more about how to do that, sign up for a free teleseminar (telephone/web seminar) with Dr. Adrienne Cox, from the Dept. of Radiation Oncology at UNC Chapel Hill (she’s one smart lady).

Don’t wait too long … the seminar is tomorrow, Thursday Feb 25th, in the evening.

Are you struggling with formulating a great specific aims page?

The specific aims are one of your keys to success.  If a reviewer encounters your aims, and gets confused or lost, then it is likely game over for your grant.  Do not collect $200, do not pass go.

In both my advising and consulting work with my younger colleagues, I focus first and foremost on the specific aims.  I won’t look at the rest of a proposal until the aims are water tight, rock solid, and exciting as well.

It is amazing how much complexity can go into formulating just this single page.  Perhaps that’s why so many people don’t do it very well.

I often see half-cocked aims pages.  But a half-cocked aims page is the start to a half-cocked proposal.  Why bother, if you aren’t going to do it right?

Just say “no” to half cocked aims

I was recently helping a consulting client with an aims page, and there was an aim which was half-cocked.

By that I mean that it was a good thing to do, but the plan for doing it wasn’t well thought out.

I suggested to the client to either firm up the plan, or get rid of the aim.

His response was, “But then I’ll only have 3 aims”.

“So what?” I said.

In my ensuing explanation, I firmed up something that was vague before.

Your aims page is a main “public face” of your proposal.

Think about your first date with someone.  Don’t you usually make sure that you look nice, before you walk out the door?  Your aims should be that same way.  They should put your best foot forward.

Sure, you may have flaws (all of us do), like a little too much flab around the waist (or whatever), but in all likelihood, you’re going to wear clothes that minimize that flaw on the first date.

Your aims should be like the first date.

A half-cocked aim is like letting the flawed parts shine out right away, saying “look at me”.  Some reviewers might overlook that.  Others will not.  All it takes is one reviewer who doesn’t like your proposal to sink its chances.

Your goal is to show strength, confidence, and logical thinking about your research, with each aim well thought out and accomplishing a critical mission within the context of your proposal.

If you put an aim on your aims page, that says, “this is one of the central things that I will focus my time and attention on during this research.”

So, if you list something, then you proceed to have a not so great plan for how you will do that “critical thing”, reviewers will wonder – has this person really thought out this work?  You don’t want reviewers holding any doubts, whatsoever.  When paylines are 1 in 8 or 1 in 10 proposals funded – one doubt can burn your funding chances to the ground.

The bottom line is that for each aim in the proposal, have a well thought out plan.  If you are struggling with figuring that plan out, then it shouldn’t be an aim!  You may still propose to do that work as a part of another aim (within the text of the proposal) – but something that is not solidly formulated should never go on the aims page.

Free specific aims template and example

I provide a free specific aims template, and a specific aims example page to my email list subscribers.  You can subscribe using the “subscribe” box on the blog here, or going to this page.

Last week I received two different emails in the same day – one from a person who is an established, successful investigator who has major angst over the new, shorter NIH grant format, and another from someone who is thankful for the shorter, more concise format.

I take the side of the second person. I strongly believe that shorter grant proposals are better for everyone. It is less time writing, and less time reading. The story has to be more focused and coherent.

In the old format, it was possible to present a large array of “facts” in an attempt to overwhelm any possible reviewer objection.

The problem with that approach is that this favored those people who have long-established lines of research, and disfavored younger investigators, or those pursuing new lines of research.

With the shorter format, one can’t expect to be convincing based on just an array of great facts and experiments. There isn’t the room for that.

Instead, the grant has to convey a “big picture” that is exciting enough to overcome reviewer doubts. Reviewers will always have doubts (even in the 25 page format).

The grants that do well are those that get reviewers so excited that they suspend disbelief.

That “big picture” aspect of grant writing is strengthened by the new NIH format. This will allow people who have innovative new ideas a better chance at competing.

I opened up the score sheet and almost fell out of my chair…

A bit over a year ago, I got into the office one day, and had an email from the NIH saying that the score sheet was ready for my R01 renewal that had been submitted a few months before.

My stomach had butterflies. My lab was depending on me – my R01 was running out in just a few short months, and without a renewal, I would have to ramp down the project and let people go.

I didn’t expect it to go well. It was the first round of submission for this competitive renewal, and all I’d heard were horror stories about rejection after rejection from colleagues. Worse yet, I’d only had 2 years since the last renewal to the time I wrote it – not much time to make significant progress! So I felt behind the ball and that we had little chance of getting this one.

But I had to know. It was a busy day, and I knew I’d go through it in a sour mood after reading about a rejection or bad score. But curiosity got the best of me.

I browsed to the NIH site. I browsed the long list of past proposals to this one. I clicked on it and scrolled down.

WHAT???!!!???!! “NO WAY!” I screamed. My lab tech immediately came to my door and said, “what’s wrong??? are you ok?” (I’m not normally one for hysterics – I’ve run 30 foot waterfalls in my whitewater kayak, and that requires nerves of steel)

I wasn’t ok, simply because I was sure that someone made a mistake. The next few days I kept checking back on the page to see if they’d corrected it. To make sure that I had a grip on reality. I waited for the conversation with my program officer.

When I finally talked to him, he confirmed it. I was stunned and shocked. In one of the most competitive years for getting proposals reviewed (2008) I had pulled a score significantly better than the top 5%.

And this was the second time in a row. Just a year before, I’d pulled a competitive renewal of my other R01 at a very similar score, on the first round.

What was going on? Well, my lab does some great work. But there’s more to it than that. Somehow, I had figured out the “secret formula” that seems to work for communicating that great science to our reviewers.

And now is your opportunity to hear about it directly from me.

Special announcement: One of the subscribers on my email list wrote that they were “freaking out” about the new grant proposal format with NIH.  So I’m going to spend 10 minutes covering that on tonight’s call, and I’ll be covering that in more detail in the upcoming course.

It’s going to be tonight, on Tuesday, January 19th at 8pm EST, 7pm CST, 6pm MST, and 5pm PST.  Subscribers will be able to call in and ask questions, or listen in on the web.

If you want to get on the call, along with getting other powerful information on grants and careers, make sure to sign up for my mailing list using the “subscribe” box on the upper left of the page, or go to: http://marketingyourscience.com

Since the call is coming up tonight, if you subscribe to my list, make sure to drop me a line right away, and I’ll send you the details of the call!

What is one of the key secrets that a great grant writer knows, but that most other people don’t?

Let’s use a story to explore this one.

In middle school I was a very disengaged student. I struggled and even dropped out for a while (funny, isn’t it, that I later became a successful professor! More on that later.)

One of the reasons I struggled was the BORING teachers.

I remember the most boring one of all. I won’t name him because I’m sure he was a well meaning guy – he just had no clue how to engage his audience, a bunch of 8th and 9th graders, to learn history.

Each day, we would go into class. He would turn off the lights and turn on the overhead projector. I remember the dusty smell of that thing, and the hum of its fan.

He would proceed to place a pre-written overhead with a litany of history facts. And then another. And then another.

He would read each one. There were no pictures. There were no illustrations. Nothing but his droning voice, the droning fan, and an endless stream of names, places, events, dates.

He required that we copy down the information on the overheads. He wanted to make sure we didn’t just sleep through it, so we had to turn in our notes for a grade.

Talk about torture!

I don’t want to make light of the cruel things that people can do to each other in the name of “torture,” but this is one of the closest experiences I’ve had.

It made me hate history. I thought history was the absolutely most awful subject on the planet. (I’ve gotten over it, and enjoy history now).

Here’s and exercise: close your eyes for a minute, and imagine yourself as a restless middle schooler, forced to sit day after day copying, as fast as you could write, one after another overhead full of “facts” about history. Maybe it’s not so hard for you to imagine if you had a teacher like that. But even if you didn’t, think about how agitated about the whole affair you might be, and how turned off to the subject it would make you. “Bored to tears” is an apt description of the experience.

Now that you’ve taken a moment to imagine that, let’s do one more exercise that applies this same torturous boredom concept to grants.

Imagine that you are a grant reviewer. You open up a grant to see an endless stream of “facts” that the writer has presented to impress you. Since you’re not an expert in the exact field of the proposers, the “facts” mean nothing to you. Yet you feel obligated to read the grant carefully, because you’ve been assigned to do so by the funding agency.

So you sit there and suffer through it, trying to absorb those facts, one after another. You look up the many buzzwords and technical terms on Wikipedia. You try to cut through the litany to figure out what the writers are proposing to do, and why they want to do it. That’s what you really want to know. But the what and why is covered up by facts and more facts.

Now imagine a contrasting grant reviewing experience. You open up a proposal to review, and it is written in smoothly flowing english without buzzwords or facts to decipher. You quickly grasp why the proposers want to do what they are proposing to do, you understand what problem it will solve, and when you get into the body of the proposal, there is an interesting, readable story.  Each time they use a buzzword, they explain its meaning, so there is no hunting around on the internet.  There are great illustrations to help you figure out the concepts that you’re unfamiliar with.

You get through the grant in a short time, excited and feeling like you didn’t waste your time.

Now think about this one final thing. After reading all the proposals, you go to a grant review meeting.  You are sitting in a room full of other grant reviewers. It is your turn to rate these two grants we just discussed, and try to convince that roomful of people to vote either for or against funding for one of these proposals. Only a few proposals (or maybe only one) out of the whole group of proposals considered by the group will get funding.

Any grant that gets funding will need someone to say some great things about it. To be really enthusiastic about it.

Are you going to be enthusiastic about the fact-laden, boring proposal? Maybe they are doing great work.

But here’s the secret: many (usually at least half) of the proposals considered that day will have “great work” in them.  You’ve seen several that contained “great work”!

What makes one or two stand out from that crowd, enough to receive the coveted funding?  Enough to receive your enthusiastic praise that is strong enough to convince everyone else in the room?

The ones that not only do “great work” but also convey that great work in a reader friendly way.

It is never reader friendly to be like my history teacher was. Ever!

Don’t once think that because you can name a large array of facts about your field that people will be impressed.

If I start blathering on about “electrospray ionization coupled to a triple quadropole and an orbitrap analyzer” – do you get impressed?  Or do you just get the sense that I’m a blowhard?  Nearly anyone can learn obscure facts!  It is not going to impress anyone!

Even if you are in my field and understand these facts, you are likely to be unswayed by my use of these “facts” unless I have tied them into an engaging story that makes it clear why they are relevant to what I’m proposing to do.

A successful grant proposal is every bit as much about what you leave out as what you include!

The bottom line

Do not bore your readers with endless facts. Know when to leave them out. If you have an essential fact that you must convey, make it obvious why you have included it (one of the chapters from my upcoming book, “Marketing Your Science” gives practical ideas on how to do this).

Don’t miss out on a newsletter with more insider secrets, a specific aims template, and a preview of the ground breaking book. You can sign up with your first name and email here:

I got a curious email this morning, from a person asking me to delete a comment from his address on my post about the grant writing class contest.  It had been posted by someone else posing as him.

I checked it out, and the comment hadn’t gone onto the blog yet (note to spammers: give it up, I don’t approve your spam comments, they just get deleted).

Here is part of what the malicious comment said:

Writing and applying for grants is akin to begging…help me in becoming a Master Begger!(sic)

Ok, a few things to our uneducated, malicious, spammer.

First, your ip address was recorded, and I know exactly which machine this was posted from.  In many countries it is a felony level crime to impersonate someone else.

Second, you show an inexcusable lack of education in these days of google.  For example, wikipedia says:

Begging (or panhandling) is to request a donation in a supplicating manner.

But that’s not the whole story.  Begging is asking for money without giving anything back.  There is no value exchanged, there is only value given (to the beggar).  It is not an equal exchange.

I know some uneducated people think that grant writing is all about asking for “free money” so that you can sit on your butt and do nothing with it (or take a vacation).  People who think that are dumb enough to equate it with begging.

But if you think that a “beggar” is going to get grants, choke on this: in the USA right now, only about 1 in 10 grant proposals to NIH get funded. In many other countries, it is even harder than that. Do you think that any panel of serious scientists is going to send grant money to someone who writes a proposal that says “please, please give me money for my research, I really really need it?”  Do you think they’re going to take away the chance of someone else to do great science, in order to send money to you, just because you’re pathetic?

If you think that, you’re smoking crack. Quit it with your bad habits.

The only science I know of that gets grant funding these days is that which offers  the promise of exceptional value in return for the funding. (hey, I just gave away one of the “secrets” of grant writing. take note.)

If you know of institutions that respond to “begging,” please, let me know.  I want some of that free money so that I can sit on my butt too (actually, I have too much energy to sit around on my butt posting malicious comments and smoking crack like our spammer – I would use the money for something useful, like actually helping people).

So, spammer, the joke is on you.  Keep going through life thinking that someday you too can get to a point where people will be giving you “free money” just because you’re a good beggar.  See where it gets you (to your local street corner).  Then look around and compare your results to the other people who actually work hard to give some value back to the world in return (people who will have houses and jobs).

The new NIH grant format includes a specific section titled “innovation,” and many are scratching their heads over what to put there.

The reason that NIH did this is because they’ve been slammed by critics in the past for not funding enough truly innovative science.  The NIH review process is known for its conservatism.

So, in comes the new format, with a new sub-section titled “innovation” (Sandwiched between its siblings Significance and Approach).

What is innovative?  Post your comment here with your own answer, so that we can get a good discussion going.

On our recent teleconference, I asked Marshall Edgell this question.  He’s one of the smartest guys I know when it comes to this stuff.  I’ll get to his answer in a minute. (Reminder, if you want to hear the whole recording, which is excellent, keep an eye out for the online course.  Or, post about your greatest grant writing challenge, and win a free entry into the course.)

Here’s my answer: innovation is not just “novelty”.

I’ve had hundreds of “novel” ideas in my life.  In most cases, I wasn’t in the right place/time to implement them, and within a year or two of my own “novel” idea, someone else came up with a very similar idea and implemented it.  If you look at the history of scientific revolutions, most “discoveries” attributed to a single person often had other people around the world coming up with similar ideas at about the same time.

In this highly connected internet age, this is truer now than ever.  The rapid flow of information gets people into similar thought patterns, so that they are more likely to come up with similar (or identical) ideas simultaneously.

If you do something that’s been done 100 times before, you can’t call it innovative.

But on the flip side, just because you come up with something “new” or “novel”, you can’t necessarily call it innovative, either.

Innovation implies not only newness, but a sense of unique utility.  Here’s an example:

Drinking water borne disease in Africa is a huge problem, killing many thousands every year.  Traditional approaches to dealing with this have included development and distribution of antibiotics and vaccines, and implementation of sanitized water systems.  But both solutions have been problematic because the infrastructure doesn’t exist for maintaining and distributing a drug supply, nor are there adequate resources to maintain proper large scale water sanitation.

In comes the Lifestraw, a “water purifier straw”. This straw has a built in sanitizing water filter, and is light and small enough that it can be carried with the person wherever they go.

Straws have been around for a long time.  I’ve used water filters on backpacking trips since I was a child to get rid of bugs like Giardia.  None of the ideas within the LifeStraw are truly new or “novel”.

But combining these old ideas and applying them to solve a pressing problem is innovative.  An innovative grant proposal will do the same thing: propose to solve a problem in new ways.

Now, back to what Marshall said in the interview.  The core of what he said is: a lot of science is not innovative, even though it is useful.  Don’t try to pretend that your science is innovative when it isn’t.  Reviewers will see right through that.  Do what you can to bring new ways of solving problems, but don’t pretend it is something that it is not.

I’ll give you a hint below… the advice comes from an 80-minute long teleseminar with Distinguished professor Marshall Edgell, on the topic of writing winning grants.  He’s the guy who turned around my own struggles with grant writing, and got me into a mode of almost continual success.  He has consistently mentored graduate students, post docs, and young faculty on how to be incredible grant writers.  He counts as friends a Nobel laureate and more than one member of the National Academy of Sciences.  He advises those high powered scientists on how to write their grant proposals. His own career has been stellar – he has made many fundamental contributions in microbial genomics and protein biophysics.

This recording is fantastic.  I thought I knew it all by now, but I didn’t.  This one recording is going to help me improve my own success in the future, by succinctly congealing key points that everyone should know who wants to be a successful grant writer.

His advice boils down to a few simple but transformational ways of approaching grant writing.  Almost anyone can do these things.  But if you don’t do them, you’re likely to struggle with grants for your entire career.

In January, you’ll be able to get a copy as part of the online course: “Secrets of writing winning grants.”  Not only will it include this recording with Marshall, but the upcoming recording with professional writer Dr. Schachter, a recording with several other prominent researchers (TBA), and several real-time, live troubleshooting sessions with me helping you figure out how to get your next proposal funded.

So, you could buy it…. ($497 or so – how much is a funded grant worth to you?), and I hope you will.  I would have paid far more than what I’ll be asking for this course, to have this information when I started out as a post doc (or assistant prof).  I would have saved years of wasted time and rejected proposals.

But I’m going to give one copy of the course out for FREE to one lucky commenter on this blog post.

Just leave a comment here about your single greatest challenge in grant writing, before December 25th.  I’ll pick one commenter at random for the free course.

Don’t wait, commenting will be closed on the 25th.

Finally, a hint about the number one secret from Dr. Edgell: visualizing.  You must have a vision for where you’re going, before you can write a great proposal about it.  You have to take the time to sit down and picture “where am I going, and what will the outcome be?”  You have to get excited about it.  Then you have to convey that excitement in your proposal.

There’s a lot more to it than that, but if you use just that one hint, your proposals will improve dramatically.

Addendum: I drew a random number to select one of the commenters, and Dongmin is the winner!  Dongmin will get the $197 course for free, and boost his/her grant writing to the next level.

I am excited to announce a grant writing teleseminar with Dr. Beth Schachter.

Beth was on the faculty of molecular and cell biology at Mount Sinai in New York City, before switching careers to focus on scientific writing. She has been highly successful in her work, helping multiple investigators formulate winning grants and papers in top journals.  She is also invited to give highly prized workshops and presentations around the world to scientists on how to improve their written communications.

On a personal note, I recently hired Beth to help with the writing and editing of one of my more challenging manuscripts.  Her time is quite expensive – and well worth it.

Next Wednesday, Dec 23rd, I will be holding a 90 minute teleseminar with Beth to discuss the secrets of writing a winning NIH grant proposal. This teleseminar will be part of an online course to be announced in January, worth $497. If you act fast, you can get in on this call and ask Dr. Schachter your own questions about grant writing, for FREE (I recently saw an advertisement for a similar grant writing teleseminar, and its cost was $197!).

There is one and only one way to get in on the call for free: By subscribing to my email list, and watching for the announcement I send to the list this weekend.  I will be inviting the fastest 10 people to respond to that email to get in on the call.

I am doing it this way to make sure that the people who get in on this call are those who are really serious about taking their grant writing to the next level, and are willing to take action.  Are you an action-taker? Or are you going to sit around and wonder why you can’t get your grants funded? Don’t miss this opportunity! Make sure to subscribe to my email list, and visualize yourself in your future grant success.

Why is the format changing?

Starting in January, NIH is implementing a shortened grant format for all of the main grant types, including R01’s and K awards.  This came from very long and involved deliberation with many members of the research community, spanning years. The key message that prompted the NIH to do this was that everyone felt like the whole grant writing and grant reviewing endeavor was wasting far too much time. On that point I am in complete agreement!

Whether or not the new format will fix this problem remains to be seen.

What is the new format?

First, the length is much shorter.  The old R01 format was 25 pages for the research plan, whereas the new one is 12 pages. That is a significant change. (See Page I-15 of the new PHS 398 forms for details on the new length requirements for various grant types.)

But there is another change that is also important, the reformulation of the “Research Plan” from the old format into a “Research Strategy” in the new format.

The research plan in the old format consisted of the following subsections: Background & Significance, Preliminary Studies and Progress Report, Research Design and Methodology.

The rules for the new format ask for a different set of subsections: “Significance, Innovation, Approach” (see page I-41 of the phs398 guidelines).  This is an important change. I discovered this when I attempted to write a few proposals using the new format for ARRA grants.  My old methodology for putting together a proposal had to be significantly revamped to make it work.

Perhaps the most important attribute of this change is that the “Preliminary Studies and Progress Report” is gone!  All preliminary studies and progress are wrapped into the approach section.  So, this one little section must convey, in about 5-6 pages, what 15 or more pages would have conveyed in the old format.

In my submitted proposal using the new format, I got hammered for “lack of detail” provided.  But apparently, everyone else must have been hammered for that, too, because I got funded.

Another important difference is the inclusion of a complete subsection addressing “innovation”.  In the old format, while “innovation” was supposed to be there, it wasn’t made so explicit as this.

This seems like an experimental gambit on the part of NIH, to try to force the system to provide more funding for truly novel and innovative work.  It attempts to address one of the biggest critiques of the NIH review process in the past, which is its rampant conservatism.  The saying has always gone something like: “You can’t get funding to do the work until you’ve already done most of the work.”

Will the inclusion of an “innovation” subsection help with this?  I think it is a baby step in the right direction, but I doubt it will overcome the overall conservatism of the NIH review process.  Nonetheless, in formulating a proposal, it will be important to start out with a clear picture of “what is innovative” about your work from the start.  I suspect that proposals lacking a clear statement addressing this won’t do too well.

Perhaps the most minor change is the switch of the subsection “Background and Significance” into just a “Significance” section.  This can be boiled down to the NIH saying something like: “We want to hear more about why the work is important than we do about the history of the science leading up to it.”

Given the low available page count, that makes sense.

How will it impact you?

There was a recent article in The Scientist about concerns that the new format would harm young investigators:

Specifically, some critics say the new, shorter forms — down from 25 to 12 pages for R01 grants — will favor better writers, making it more difficult for younger investigators to compete for NIH funding.

The argument of this article is that if you are a young scientist, then you aren’t as capable of writing a concise, focused proposal, and so you are less likely to succeed.

I’m not sure that I agree with that viewpoint.

On the one hand, young scientists seem to often have a harder time conveying the big-picture value of their work to the audience (which is one of the main reasons for this blog and the book I am writing).

On the other hand, the old format allowed for sometimes excruciating experimental detail and methodologies.  I believe that benefitted established investigators who already had this stuff worked out (i.e. “who had already done the work”).

The first few major proposals I submitted were rejected, until I submitted one where I had already made the major innovative leap (i.e. done the most important work), and the proposal was just to fill in the details around it.  The old format allowed me to describe in quite gory detail how we had made it work, and how we would extend that.

This new format wouldn’t allow this.  With its combination of much shorter length, and focus on an “innovation” section, it will make it much harder to take work that has a long history and provide a bunch of impressive detail about that work.  This should actually remove some of the traditional advantage that experienced investigators have had over their newer colleagues.

Further, there is some benefit for young investigators in not being habituated to the old format.  My first ARRA proposal in the new format was a lot harder for me, because I am so habituated to the old format that I first attempted to write that proposal the way I would have written a regular R01.  After writing 15 pages of stuff, and still having a lot more to go, I realized that I had to completely re-think my approach.  I ended up rewriting a lot of it.  In this sense, a new investigator has little disadvantage over someone like me, because we are both new to the format.

So on balance, I don’t agree with The Scientist that this new format harms young investigators disproportionately.

Being a stellar writer is a key to science career success

I was somewhat offended by the article’s implication that young scientists weren’t as capable at writing as their more senior counterparts.

Any young scientist who wants a successful scientific career must absolutely learn how to write well, regardless of the whims of the current grant formatting requirements.  This is a vital foundation for nearly all scientific career success.

To imply that this is only something that can be gained after many years of grant writing experience is silly.  It can be learned – if you pay attention to learning it and focus your efforts on doing so.  The reason most people don’t learn this until later in their careers is because nobody teaches it to them.  Most seem to go into new positions not realizing that their lack of training in critical skills like this is a problem, and so they have to learn about their own deficits in training the hard way (e.g. grant rejections).

I am a good example of that.  When I wrote about my experiences with my colleague giving me major critical feedback on my specific aims, there was a key point I was making, without being explicit about it: that the experience with my colleague forced me to realize that I had a lot of learning to do, and that I needed to get my butt in gear to do it.

And so I did.  Since that single decision I made, my proposals have had much better track record than before.  I was able to learn how to do it, simply because I decided that I needed to learn how to do it better. I sought out a mix of resources, some of which I’ll be talking about in future posts.  But the key is in wanting to learn to improve.

The first step is acknowledging there is a deficiency.

But for young scientists who acknowledge their own limitations with respect to writing well, and who work hard to overcome them, I don’t think that senior scientists will have an advantage over them. I’ve seen some not so great writing from many senior scientists (perhaps because things weren’t so competitive when they got started).  On a skill as important as this, it is better to start learning earlier than later.  The brain seems a bit more flexible when young.

Additional resources

First, if you are about to prepare a proposal, have a look at the new phs398 forms and documents earlier rather than later.  Writing to the new format requires a different approach.

Second, you can sign up here to gain free access to a foundational preview chapter from the book I am writing, “Marketing Your Science,” that will help you see any scientific communication you produce in a new and more effective way. You’ll also get access to a video covering one of the key points of grant writing: “You have 60 seconds”.

If I run across any other good discussions of the new format, I’ll send them out to my list members or post them here.