TEA BREAK
ACEING ACADEMIA: Week 3 Review
Please note: The ACEing Academia series was originally published on LinkedIn. Each category is represented by a suite from playing cards to reflect the “ACEing” theme, with each week ending with a brief review Am I allowed to say that January is flying by? It certainly feels like that as I look back
ACEING ACADEMIA #12: Avoid an inconsistent writing style
A chemist, a physicist, and an engineer walk into a bar … no, scratch that. A chemist, a physicist, and an engineer write a grant proposal. They each write about their particular area of expertise, stitch it all together, and hit submit. Can you see the potential problem? It doesn’t
ACEING ACADEMIA #11: Avoid squeezing too many ideas in a paragraph
This is not a trick question: how many ideas should be in each paragraph of an academic document? The answer: just one idea per paragraph please. This pulls together ACEing Academia 3 and 7: you need to avoid unstructured paragraphs AND creating a wall of text. However, the reason that
ACEING ACADEMIA #10: Avoid verbosity; be concise
In high school, we would be penalised if we went more than 10% over or under the word limit given for a writing assignment. A similar rule was in place when I went to university. As a student, the word limit is seen as a target to aim for because
ACEING ACADEMIA #9: Avoid Irrelevant Content
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,
ACEING ACADEMIA: Week 2 Review
Please note: The ACEing Academia series was originally published on LinkedIn. Each category is represented by a suite from playing cards to reflect the “ACEing” theme, with each week ending with a brief review There is no such thing as a perfect proposal. But there are always ways to make it better. Avoiding
ACEING ACADEMIA #8: Avoid the Wrong Tone
Yo peeps, it’s Fri-yay! I’m going to keep this short and sweet cause the weekend’s here and it’s time to par-TAY. IYKYK 😉 No, my LinkedIn account has not been hacked. And fortunately, I can’t recall ever seeing a grant proposal that’s quite this informal. But this is a communication
ACEING ACADEMIA #7: Avoid Writing a Wall of Text
This next common error is so prevalent in academic writing that I want to mention it in the very first sentence: avoid creating a wall of text. What is a wall of text you ask? This is when an author just keeps adding to a paragraph and, as a reader,
ACEING ACADEMIA #6: Avoid Unexplained Jargon
I think there tends to be a preconception in academia that complex ideas can only be communicated with complex language. That just isn’t the case. However, being able to explain complex ideas simply and succinctly often takes more time and thought to get right. Throw in the Curse of Knowledge,
ACEING ACADEMIA #5: Address the Assessment Criteria
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
JUST FOR FUN: Academic Smartcuts Meets Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld (via ChatGPT), Part 2
Of course, I had to share the result I got in Part 1 on my LinkedIn feed. The knock-on effect of this was that a connection then asked ChatGPT to describe her business as if it were a guild in Ankh-Morpork. I saw her post and ran with the prompt
JUST FOR FUN: Academic Smartcuts Meets Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld (via ChatGPT), Part 1
I’ve been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn recently while sharing the ACEing Academia series, and someone’s post caught my eye. They had used a prompt on ChatGPT to describe their business as if it were inebriated. The result was both hilarious and somewhat accurate. I had to try