Make the Grant Look Pretty Posted on October 19, 2007 Robert C. Malenka (bio) stresses the importance of aesthetics in grant writing.

Try to put yourself in the position of the person who’s, in this case, reading the grant.

You have to imagine this poor person, somebody like me, you know, is getting this pile of grants this high. You know, depending on the organization they might be 20 grants, each of which is ten-page single-spaced. If it’s an NIH study section, you might be getting a pile of 10 or 12 grants that are 25-page single-spaced grants. So think about that. If you’re in that position of a reviewer, let’s think: What kind of grant is going to make me feel prone to like the grant? Well, it’s a grant that is neat. It does not have ten-point font with no spaces between paragraphs so all I see is page after page of text.

Let me tell ya, that pisses me off from the very beginning. You know, I want a clearly laid out — best advice I got about grantsmanship is, “Make the grant look pretty.” I say this to my post-docs. Just make it aesthetically look pretty with nice spacing between the different sections and bold titles for each different sections. And if you have figures, the figures are laid out and the figure legends are nice.

And this sounds trite, but to me that shows somebody who cares about their grant, who understands what I’m going through as a reviewer.

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