Grant Services

Writing grants is perhaps the most challenging thing that successful scientist has to do. The pressure is high. You know that if you don’t bring in enough support, you will be forced to pare down what you are doing: fewer investigations, fewer projects, fewer employees, less space. You may even be forced to find a new place to work. One grant can literally make or break your career. In 2021 the NIH had nearly 60,000 R01 grant applications, and funded less than 20% of them. Most of those required more than one submission. So, how do you ensure your proposal is in the top fifth of applications? Clearly there are many factors: a compelling question, excellent, innovative experimental design, proposing to use the latest and most appropriate technology, and outstanding preliminary data that demonstrates your ability to complete the work proposed.

But how you write that proposal is one often overlooked component of a successful application. Among our grant editors, we’ve seen time and again good proposals that received less favorable priority scores simply because errors in language and phrasing gave the impression that the investigator was careless or had not taken the application process seriously enough.

So, give yourself the Clarity in Science advantage. We will not only provide a thorough edit of language and phrasing, but we will also comment on the science itself: experimental design, logic and flow, preliminary data quality and presentation, and even feasibility. These points will appear as comments attached to the file using MS Word’s “comment” function. And, of course, all proposals will be handled with the utmost confidentiality, and no one with a conflict of interest will ever see your proposal from us.

Because we take time to do more than just correct language, all grants are billed on an hourly basis, rather than per word. For a thorough grant review, we charge just $100/hour for the expert service we provide. And unlike your senior colleague down the hall who says he will help but never seems to get back to you, we will respond promptly with detailed comments and corrections, in plenty of time for you to address them before submission.

If you would like for Clarity in Science Editing and Writing to help you with your grant submission, please email us at info@clarityinscience.com.