Sidebar: The Dos and Don'ts of Winning Dollars
Sidebar: Grant Writing - For More Information
"I was getting burned really badly," Woerpel remembers. Obviously, something was wrong. When Woerpel shared research ideas with colleagues, he sounded animated. But that animation didn't come through when he was writing up his work for grant reviewers. Reading his grant applications was like perusing term papers. "If I'd been writing a 10-page paper for college, I would have been very proud," he says.
Painful as it was, Woerpel forced himself to go over his rejected grants, paragraph by paragraph. Then he did some reorganizing. His goal: to sound less like a student, and more like a researcher brainstorming with friends. Instead of rambling into a grant application with a long research history, he started with a quick bit of context-and then explained how his work added to it. The new focus, he says, was ...
