ACEING ACADEMIA #1: Avoid the Curse of Knowledge

The common errors I’ll be sharing as part of the ACEingAcademia series are grouped by topic—Content, Clarity, Structure, Style—but they’re not provided in any particular order. Life is too short to attempt to quantify the most common mistakes made in academic writing.

Except for this one.

I would be remiss if I didn’t start with the cognitive bias known as the Curse of Knowledge.

Cognitive biases are shortcuts in the brain that we use to save time and energy. This particular shortcut can be translated to, “Once you’ve learned something, you think that others also understand it.”

I believe this causes most of the problems in academic communication: everyone is convinced their audience understands exactly what they’re doing and why.

With grant writing in particular, this can result in proposals where the author has failed to explain the need for their research or the context necessary to understand the novelty of the project.

Why is this a problem?

Reviewers may be from an adjacent discipline and will be unfamiliar with nuances the applicant takes for granted. At the very least, they’re not going to know every detail like the principal investigator will.

The failure of the author to clearly and explicitly address the significance, feasibility, or novel aspects of the project will then result in confused reviewers. In turn, confused reviewers lead to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and—usually—negative reviews.

Basically, the Curse of Knowledge serves as a barrier between the applicant’s brilliant idea and their reader’s understanding of it.

So, how do you avoid it?

I’ll be the first to admit that it can be incredibly challenging to tackle this cognitive bias, especially in academia. A researcher can spend years of their life marinating in their specific research topic, and it becomes easy to forget that this is not the norm. However, there are a few steps that can help:

1️⃣ IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE: Knowing the type of people who will read your proposal can help you tailor it. Hint: there are usually multiple audiences. Aiming for an intelligent non-expert will usually serve you well.

2️⃣ STAY ALERT AND AVOID AUTO-PILOT: When revising a proposal or paper, check any assumptions you may have made. Will someone who is not you understand your argument? Remember, this is your reader’s first time seeing your idea.

3️⃣ GET FEEDBACK: This is an important step to help avoid errors, full stop. Sharing a proposal (or paper) with those outside of your field—or even outside of academia—can help pinpoint text that is unclear or assumptions that will lead the reader astray.

As part of our training programmes, Professor Dan Allwood and I can never promise a grant will be successfully funded. However, I can almost guarantee that avoiding the Curse of Knowledge will improve the competitiveness of your proposal. At the very least, it will give your great idea the chance to shine.