Tuesday, August 09, 2011

It Hurts When I Do This

Today in Scientopia, I respond to a reader's distress about re-reading a recently submitted grant proposal.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Agreed with all of this. Don't read your proposal again until much later (either turning it into a paper if you had preliminary data, or when you get your reviews back). Minor typos don't impact my review, and I've had a proposal funded that had something along the lines of "{cite Smith's work here}" (which made me laugh out loud when I re-read the proposal upon getting the money and trying to remember what I promised to do :). The science is more important than the editing.

Also, in my field, proposals have less than a 20% hit rate. Why try to make it flawless if it doesn't matter and only a handful of people will ever read it? Spend the time on your papers and coming up with really good research ideas.