Grants are Organic Documents Posted on January 14, 2008 Question and method are clearly connected in a well-written grant proposal, suggests F. Xavier Castellanos (bio).

The hardest thing in designing a grant is making sure that it's a completely organic document, that the fundamental questions, that which the investigator wants to know, are well motivated, that we should care, why this question should be answered, and that the methods for answering that question are actually going to be able to answer that question, and that the statistical techniques to determine whether or not the question has been answered are appropriate. And so it's a whole series of linkages, and too frequently we all work so much more effectively because of computers because we can copy and paste. But by virtue of copy-and-paste kinds of operations, we basically sometimes put four grants together that aren't all that well connected.

And so it's the lack of paying attention to the fact that these things aren't well connected and that the fundamental aims are not really following from where the field is or at least the way it's being described or you're forgetting to mention all these things that don't agree with your perspective, and that's a big no-no as well. But most importantly, that the way in which you seek to answer this is really going to give you a question you can understand.

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