Formatting Matters

I have been reading a lot of proposals and research statements lately. It is very important that documents such as these grab the reader/reviewer at the beginning and then follow through with compelling supporting information in subsequent parts. Unlike manuscripts, these types of documents are more free style in how they are formatted, with only a few limits about fonts, font size, and margins.

Especially in long documents, the use of various formatting styles helps highlight when a sentence, phrase, or word is really important. Bulleted lists, the creative and appropriate use of subheadings and paragraphs, and (at least in science) the insertion of useful or cool images can also be effective formatting tools.

But then there are those persons who go berserk with the formatting and treat the reader like we are all too dense (or lazy) to pick out an important word or concept. Writing that your research is innovative doesn’t necessarily make it so.. but a well-written sentence or succinct paragraph about your research or ideas might get this same point across in a less obnoxious way.

I know that in some cases this excessive formatting likely is a response to a previous proposal review that indicates a reviewer couldn’t possibly have read the text, but there are effective ways to emphasize important text and there are annoying ways to emphasize arguably important text.

I use bold type in grant proposals, but sparingly, and I try to put one illustration on each page. I summarize main points with

• bulleted
• lists

and I am a big fan of breaking up giant chunks of text with subheadings (but not too many).

Sentences don’t have to be terse. Long sentences should, however, be avoided if they contain a lot of really very many unnecessary, non essential, redundant and extra words, unless they are all very beautiful words, which is unlikely but not impossible*.

In the stack of proposals that I just read, I was intrigued that some people used bold type, some used italics, and some underlined. Fortunately I did not encounter anyone who used all three styles in one document; there seem to be distinctive personal styles when it comes to emphasis. I did notice in these few dozen proposals that I just read (about half of which were science/engineering and the rest humanities) that, in this group, scientists and engineers tend to favor bold type and humanities faculty tend to favor italics or underlining, with the exception of political scientists (bold type).

In proposals, I am much more likely to use bold type than other formats, but in this blog, I veer between bold and italics depending on my mood. I am not typically an underliner. I find underlined words aesthetically unpleasing. I will not hold this against a proposal-writer who writes that their work is innovative (underlined), but I might hold it against them for not backing that statement up.

And then there are the people who put lots of words in

‘quotation marks’.

I wrote about this topic last year at about this same time because ‘tis the season for me to read lots of proposals from faculty whose 'primary' expertise is in the humanities, and many of these faculty favor long, complex sentences that contain ‘words’ that I don’t understand although the proposal-writers are specifically told to eschew ’jargon’ (see also December 6, 2006: This Post Contains ‘Words’).

This issue of formatting is important because if a reviewer of a proposal (or a reader of a research statement) is reading more than a few proposals/statements (e.g., dozens to > 100), they may well not read every word. You need to write your document so that a reader either wants to read every word (because what you write is so fascinating) or you need to structure the text so that essential points will be noticed. It is very important that these essential points have content and not just be empty statements to the effect that you think you are awesome.

* Clearly, Proust did not change my life, although I am always in search of lost time.