Writing successful grant applications?

In our "how can we help you?" thread, J writes:

How to write a successful grant application? I am soon to defend my PhD and I have many publications both in good general journals and top special journals so publishing is not an issue. However, where I am located it is normal to apply for a grant application as a PostDoc - to get any funding for your work. But how on earth one writes a successful application? For me, the problem seems to be that if I have an idea for a paper, I can easily write a publishable article on the topic. All I have to do is to look for articles in the journals and write my own ideas in the same way. But I have never seen a grant application that received funding, so I have no idea how they look. Is it possible to see successful grant applications somewhere? And another related point. How do you come up with ideas that need years working? When I have an idea, I write a short clever article in a few days and publish it in a journal that is fast. How to come up with 'big questions' or themes that need to be worked for many years? Do people just take the small issues and somehow make them look like big when they apply for example a grant for three years?

It seems for me that the grants go for people who know how to write applications and who can justify others that some (minor) issue needs years of pondering when in reality an efficient scholar could write an article or two on the same topic quite fast. Is it easier to get a grant for writing a book than articles? Or do I even have to explain in the application whether I am going to publish my research in a book or in articles? If I am saying I want to write a book, does it help if I manage to get a book contract before receiving funding for it? It seems yes, but on the other hand, if publishers want to see the whole manuscript before giving a contract, then the funder might think that the work is already done if one has the contract and thus maybe they do not give any money because no-one gives you money if the work is already done.

Lots of good questions here. I don't have much experience applying for grants, so I'm really not the best person to ask for advice here. But I have recently applied for one grant (currently under review), and have experience coming up with 'big questions' (two books and a third book idea for the grant application), so I can say a bit about that.

As I noted in my post on tips for coming up with paper ideas, one of the the more fruitful strategies I've found for coming up with 'big ideas' is to (1) go back to the very basics of a philosophical problem, (2) isolate some foundational assumption that nearly everyone working on it seems to accept, and then (3) challenge that assumption in some way. Since the assumption is foundational, challenging it typically then involves challenging everything that follows from it--in other words, lots of other stuff to publish on. So, for example, my first book began with a chapter on philosophical methodology. Standard philosophical methods (including in moral philosophy) involve appealing to premises that 'seem true or plausible' to oneself and one's interlocutors. But, or so I argue (following a fairly long line of philosophers dating back at least until Mill), this methodology is of questionable reliability at best. Very different premises seem true or plausible to different people, and what seems true or plausible in one generation seems not to another--so what we get in the end from standard philosophical methods is a vast plurality of rival philosophical theories, all of which claim to be true or plausible, but none of which seem to have a good claim thereunto. So I challenged that methodology, defending another alternative in its stead: seven principles of theory-selection adapted from the sciences--which I argued support very different foundations for ethics, and in turn a novel theory of prudence and morality.

I've found this general strategy--questioning and replacing a foundational assumption--to be fruitful for developing big ideas on multiple occasions. For example, prior to my dissertation, Rawlsians had generally assumed that one can apply Rawls' theory of justice to the real world without adapting the original position to those circumstances. Yet, it occurred to me, Rawls thinks justice is fairness and the original position just is his model of fairness--so it stands to order that we must apply it to nonideal conditions to determine what justice as fairness requires in the real world. Similarly, basically everyone in the human rights literature assumed that human rights are a unified class of moral claims--that is, that something either is or is not a human right simpliciter. Yet, this seemed like a rather strange assumption to me, as some human rights seemed to me to be claims to enforcement by domestic institutions, whereas others seemed to me to warrant coercive international enforcement. So, it occurred to me, maybe we can solve a lot of theoretical and practical problems about human rights by splitting them into two types: domestic and international human rights.

Anyway, I'm sure this isn't the only way to come up with 'big ideas' for things like grants. But the case for it being a good general strategy for this, again, is pretty straightforward: the deeper the assumption(s) in a literature you challenge, the greater the likelihood that challenging it is likely to lead to a big project--something far larger than a paper or two.

But this is more or less all of the advice that I have here. Like I said, I don't have much experience with grants. So then, do any of you who do have experience with grant-writing have any helpful tips to share?

Comments

[Bryce]

In her book The Professor Is In, Karen Kelsky talks about grant-writing and gives a nice template for how to set it up. I won several grants with it in graduate school and have recommended it to many people.

Grant-writing is less about the “big idea” and the content of it than it is about the way you frame everything (in other words, it’s just like getting an article published!). There is a group of people who have money; you want that money. Your job is to convince them to give it to you. Most of the time the people who control the money will not have any idea what any of the people are talking about in their applications, but they will be able to notice when ideas or proposals sound interesting and compelling. The people who get the money are the ones who write proposals like that.

[Malcolm]

I've managed to get an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) grant as well as some others, and while retroactively determining what made one's submission successful is basically impossible, one thing I tried to do was avoid jargon.

For the NEH grant, and I think many others, the committee evaluating is not made up of just philosophers. So it's important to identify the problem you're addressing in language that's interdisciplinarily accessible. If you can demonstrate that what you're doing is interesting to a group of non-specialists, I think you're partway there.

Then another piece is your results. It's not so much about whether it's a book or a series of articles, but what those publications will do. How do you hope to intervene in the existing conversation? Your "deliverables," to use the grant-writing jargon, are the publications, but the committee wants evidence that they will have some impact.

The OP says grants seem to go to people who "can justify [to] others that some (minor) issue needs years of pondering when in reality an efficient scholar could write an article or two on the same topic quite fast." If you can turn around a paper and don't need a grant, wonderful! But grants can give people funds to take a semester from teaching which will let you do research. And believe it or not, some people actually need to do research, translation, even social science experiments, and other time-requiring activities to do good philosophy.

And if you are aiming to intervene in a conversation, grant money can fund conferences and workshops where you start that process early. While perhaps solo armchair philosophizing makes sense for some people, many grant committees will want to see evidence that the grant writer is going to engage with other people throughout the process of writing, researching, and publishing. Having a concrete plan for how you'll contribute to the broader academic community is also a good idea.

While I'm not 100% on Karen Kelskey's work, I do think her grant writing template is a nice starting structure if you're stuck. But, of course, do pay attention to the specific grant call!

[Jakub]

If writing & publishing papers is that easy ("All I have to do is to look for articles in the journals and write my own ideas in the same way."), then so are grant applications. All one has to do is to look for successful grant proposals and then write a proposal in the same way. At least I have learned much from studying other's grant proposals. Many people publish their proposals on their websites or Academia. Moreover, one can become a reviewer or a panel member.