Most of the tips I’ve been sharing as part of the ACEing Academia series can be used beyond grant proposals: throwing them into any type of academic writing will result in greater clarity for everyone involved. However, this next piece of advice is perhaps the most proposal-specific recommendation so far.

One of the very first phone calls I received when I was a new portfolio manager at EPSRC was from a distraught researcher who hadn’t been funded at a recent panel. He was unhappy with the reviewer comments because they had questions about a topic that his project wasn’t about,

I kicked off the ACEing Academia series with the Curse of Knowledge because this one error is the foundation of many other mistakes in grant writing, and it should be avoided at all costs. Which brings me to this content-related tip: You must clearly address the funder’s assessment criteria in

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