Writing Winning Grant Proposals: Unwritten Rules & Best Practices

The information collected here was prepared especially for faculty at Trent University. Please do not circulate.

The column that I write for University Affairs is called “Ask Dr. Editor.”

How Grant Peer Review Works:

SSHRC Insight & Insight Development Competitions

SSHRC Manual for Merit Review Committee Members | the real meat begins about half-way down, with the section “Before the merit review committee meeting”

Merit Review Committees is where you can find the list of last year’s peer reviewers

SSHRC’s Award Search Engine can enable you to locate successful applicants from your institution, region, or professional association, whom you can then approach to ask if they’d be willing to give you guidance on which committee or committees they have submitted to previously, and their impressions of the cultures of those committees.

Implications of Grant Applications’ Unusual Peer Review Processes

• Figure out what committee to apply to by Googling last year’s peer reviewers. You can find last year’s reviewers for SSHRC, CIHR, and NFRF; NSERC will give you this year’s peer reviewers; CFI won’t give you anything. Here’s the direct link to where you’ll find last year’s SSHRC reviewers. Some folks have been known to invite last year’s reviewers to give invited talks at their institution, tour their lab, present at their work-in-progress seminar. I think that’s wild but it does happen.
• Applications that assume specialized knowledge are hard for reviewers to champion.
• Write your summary and first page as if they might be scanned during the committee meeting.
• Cite works that your reviewers might remember from their comprehensive exams (or earlier!).
• In our competitive funding environment, clear writing gives your application an edge. Err towards short sentences, cut ‘is’, and balance abstract language with illustrative examples.

Unwritten rules for research grant applicants

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Post-Secondary Research System is a report published by the Council of Canadian Academies in October 2024 (and it’s the source of Table 5.1, “EDI considerations in select federal grant programs”)

I quoted from this article: Boudreau, K. J., Guinan, E. C., Lakhani, K. R., & Riedl, C. (2016). Looking across and looking beyond the knowledge frontier: Intellectual distance, novelty, and resource allocation in science. Management science, 62(10), 2765-2783. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2285

1. Know what your results will be before you propose the project
2. Prioritize your contributions to scholarship (knowledge, methods & theory)
3. The peripheral pieces are central to a successful grant (grab the evaluation criteria as a rubric here; this link opens as a PDF)

You can find additional unwritten rules in the form of quotations from peer reviewers by downloading the four PDFs that I’ve linked to at the bottom of this page.

Best practices (AKA Letitia’s most frequent edits):

1. The summary isn’t a summary
2. Your objectives should be distinct from your methods
3. Your knowledge mobilization plan should map onto your expected outcomes
4. Justify your budget expenses in three parts (see “Drafting the budget for your first SSHRC grant application”)

“Ask Dr. Editor” pieces with grant-specific advice:

• Editing strategies: “Five top writing tips explained”; “Emphasize this: structuring highly readable sentences and paragraphs”; “Clarify this: structuring highly readable lists”; “A quick shave for your grant proposal: cutting your word count in page-limited texts”; “How to integrate storytelling into your next research grant application”; “Using the active voice strategically”; “Simple tricks to add clarity in complex sentences”; “Reducing the weight of your words”; “Writing well is hard: how to write like the best writers in your discipline”
• Impact & influence: “Answering the “So what?” in SSHRC applications”; “Demonstrating impact in your tenure dossier” (lists tools that you can use to show diverse impact); “Telling your research story with numbers: impact metrics for the humanities” (again, tools that attest to impact); “Against utility and instrumentalization: knowledge mobilization for the humanities”
• Budget & budget justification: “Your grant budget is a mess!”; “Drafting the budget for your first SSHRC grant application” (this three-part structure applies to any budget justification, not just SSHRC; it also links to a free budget brainstorming spreadsheet that I designed specifically for SSHRC)
• Figures & images: “Three ways to use colour effectively in grant applications”; “Quick, yet polished visuals for grant applications”; “Quick yet polished timelines for grant applications” (includes free timeline templates)
• Other specific components of a grant: “Writing a successful narrative CV”; “Drafting compelling letters of support for research grant funding” (for any partner letters, likely not for IG or IDG); “How to write clear objectives for your research grant proposal”; “On internal alignment: objectives, outcomes, outputs, and contributions in CIHR Project grant applications” (also relevant for SSHRC and NSERC)
• Funders beyond Tri-Agency: “Becoming an academic-artist: how to apply for your first artist’s grant”; “Preventing budget overruns for your CFI Innovation Fund request”; “Submit with confidence: CFI Innovation Fund best practices”
• Other relevant pieces: “Your reader is a little bit drunk”; “Making ambitious research look feasible”; “How to show your project’s worth in social science and humanities research proposals”; “Getting “is” right”

Let me email you these PDFs:

• I published the NFRF Peer Reviewers’ Perspective doc in my January 2025 piece for my column, and the SSHRC Peer Reviewers’ Perspectives doc in May 2025.
• I was fortunate to be able to receive funding to hire three UBC graduate student interns to support this project: Andrea Kampen, Olivia Brophy, and Athena Pallas.
• Because I’m hoping to update these documents when I’ve done more interviews, I’ve asked for your email address. This approach means that I can email you with updated or new documents when they are available. Because I want to keep these docs up-to-date, I ask you to not circulate the PDFs at all; instead, please direct your colleagues to my column, where I’ll publish the URL that folks can use to get an email with the doc they’re interested in.