The art of writing reseach proposel
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The Art of Writing Proposals
By
Adam Przeworski and Frank Salomon
Writing
proposals for research funding is a peculiar facet
of North American
academic culture, and as
with all things cultural, its attributes rise only
partly into
public consciousness. A proposal's
overt function is to persuade a committee of
scholars that the project shines with the
three kinds of merit all disciplines value,
namely, conceptual innovation, methodological
rigor, and rich, substantive content.
But to
make these points stick, a proposal writer needs a
feel for the unspoken
customs, norms, and
needs that govern the selection process itself.
These are not
really as arcane or ritualistic
as one might suspect. For the most part, these
customs
arise from the committee's efforts to
deal in good faith with its own problems:
incomprehension among disciplines, work
overload, and the problem of equitably
judging
proposals that reflect unlike social and academic
circumstances.
Writing for committee
competition is an art quite different from
research work itself.
After long deliberation,
a committee usually has to choose among proposals
that all
possess the three virtues mentioned
above. Other things being equal, the proposal
that is awarded funding is the one that gets
its merits across more forcefully because
it
addresses these unspoken needs and norms as well
as the overt rules. The purpose
of these pages
is to give competitors for Council fellowships and
funding a more even
start by making explicit
some of those normally unspoken customs and needs.
Capture the Reviewer's Attention?
While
the form and the organization of a proposal are
matters of taste, you should
choose your form
bearing in mind that every proposal reader
constantly scans for
clear answers to three
questions:
Adam Przeworski and Frank Salomon,
The Art of Writing Proposals
1988, 1995
1
• What are we going to
learn as the result of the proposed project that
we do
not know now?
• Why is it worth
knowing?
• How will we know that the
conclusions are valid?
Working through a tall
stack of proposals on voluntarily-donated time, a
committee
member rarely has time to comb
proposals for hidden answers. So, say what you
have
to say immediately, crisply, and
forcefully. The opening paragraph, or the first
page
at most, is your chance to grab the
reviewer's attention. Use it. This is the moment
to overstate, rather than understate, your
point or question. You can add the
conditions
and caveats later.
Questions that are clearly
posed are an excellent way to begin a proposal:
Are strong
party systems conducive to
democratic stability? Was the decline of
population
growth in Brazil the result of
government policies? These should not be
rhetorical
questions; they have effect
precisely because the answer is far from obvious.
Stating
your central point, hypothesis, or
interpretation is also a good way to begin:
Workers do not organize unions; unions
organize workers. The success, and failure,
of
Corazon Aquino's revolution stems from its middle-
class origins. Population
growth coupled with
loss of arable land poses a threat to North
African food security
in the next decade.
Obviously some projects are too complex and
some conceptualizations too subtle for
such
telegraphic messages to capture. Sometimes only
step-by-step argumentation
can define the
central problem. But even if you adopt this
strategy, do not fail to
leave the reviewer
with something to remember: some message that will
remain after
reading many other proposals and
discussing them for hours and hours. She's the one
who claims that Argentina never had a liberal
democratic tradition is how you want
to be
referred to during the committee's discussion, not
Oh yes, she's the one from
Chicago.
Adam
Przeworski and Frank Salomon, The Art of Writing
Proposals
1988, 1995
2
Aim for Clarity
Remember that
most proposals are reviewed by multidisciplinary
committees. A
reviewer studying a proposal
from another field expects the proposer to meet
her
halfway. After all, the reader probably
accepted the committee appointment because
of
the excitement of surveying other people's ideas.
Her only reward is the chance
that proposals
will provide a lucidly-guided tour of various
disciplines' research
frontiers. Don't cheat
the reviewer of this by inflicting a tiresome trek
through the
duller idiosyncrasies of your
discipline. Many disciplines have parochial
traditions of
writing in pretentious jargon.
You should avoid jargon as much as you can, and
when
technical language is really needed,
restrict yourself to those new words and technical
terms that truly lack equivalents in common
language. Also, keep the spotlight on
ideas.
An archeologist should argue the concepts latent
in the ceramic typology more
than the typology
itself, a historian the tendency latent in the
mass of events, and so
forth. When additional
technical material is needed, or when the argument
refers to
complex ancillary material, putting
it into appendices decongests the main text.
Establish the Context
Your proposal should
tell the committee not only what will be learned
as a result of
your project, but what will be
learned that somebody else does not already know.
It
is essential that the proposal summarize
the current state of knowledge and provide
an
up-to-date, comprehensive bibliography. Both
should be precise and succinct.
They need not
constitute a review of the literature but a
sharply focused view of the
specific body or
bodies of knowledge to which you will add.
Committees often treat
bibliographies as a
sign of seriousness on the part of the applicant,
and some
members will put considerable effort
into evaluating them. A good bibliography
testifies that the author did enough
preparatory work to make sure the project will
complement and not duplicate other people's
efforts. Many proposals fail because
the
references are incomplete or outdated. Missing
even a single reference can be
very costly if
it shows failure to connect with research directly
relevant to one's own.
Proposal writers with
limited library resources are urged to correspond
with
Adam Przeworski and Frank Salomon, The
Art of Writing Proposals
1988, 1995
3
colleagues and
libraries elsewhere in the early stages of
research planning. Resource
guides such as
Dissertation Abstracts International and Social
Science Periodical
Index are highly
recommended. For many disciplines, annual reviews
(e.g., Annual
Review of Anthropology) offer
state-of-the-art discussions and rich
bibliographies.
Some disciplines have
bibliographically-oriented journals, for example
Review of
Economic Literature and Contemporary
Sociology. There are also valuable area
studies-oriented guides: Handbook of Latin
American Studies, International African
Bibliography, etc. Familiarizing yourself with
them can save days of research.
Powerful
bibliographic searches can be run on CD-ROM
databases such as the
Social Science Citations
Index, Social Sciences Index, and Modern Language
Association International Index. Also, on-line
databases such as CARL and ERIC,
available by
library or network access, greatly increase your
bibliographic reach.
What's the Payoff?
Disciplinary norms and personal tastes in
justifying research activities differ greatly.
Some scholars are swayed by the statement that
it has not been studied (e.g., an
historian
may argue that no book has been written about a
particular event, and
therefore one is
needed), while other scholars sometimes reflect
that there may be a
good reason why not.
Nevertheless, the fact that less is known about
one's own
chosen case, period, or country than
about similar ones may work in the proposer's
favor. Between two identical projects, save
that one concerns Egypt and the other
the
Sudan, reviewers are likely to prefer the latter.
Citing the importance of the
events that
provide the subject matter is another and perhaps
less dubious appeal.
Turning points, crucial
breakthroughs, central personages, fundamental
institutions,
and similar appeals to the
significance of the object of research are
sometimes
effective if argued rather than
merely asserted. Appealing to current importance
may
also work: e.g., democratic consolidation
in South America, the aging population in
industrialized countries, the relative decline
of the hegemony of the United States.
It's
crucial to convince readers that such topics are
not merely timely, but that their
current
urgency provides a window into some more abiding
problem. Among many
Adam Przeworski and Frank
Salomon, The Art of Writing Proposals
1988,
1995
4
social
scientists, explicit theoretical interest counts
heavily as a point of merit.
Theoretical
exposition need not go back to the axiomatic bases
of the discipline,
proposal readers will have
a reasonable interdisciplinary breadth, but it
should
situate the local problem in terms of
its relevance to live, sometimes controversial,
theoretical currents. Help your reader
understand where the problem intersects the
main theoretical debates in your field and
show how this inquiry puts established
ideas
to the test or offers new ones. Good proposals
demonstrate awareness of
alternative
viewpoints and argue the author's position in such
a way as to address the
field broadly, rather
than developing a single sectarian tendency
indifferent to
alternatives.
Use a Fresh
Approach
Surprises, puzzles, and apparent
contradictions can powerfully persuade the
reviewer
whose disciplinary superego enforces
a commitment to systematic model building or
formal theorizing: Given its long-standing
democratic traditions, Chile was expected
to
return to democracy before other countries in the
Southern Cone, and yet . . . Is
it because
these traditions were already extinct by 1973 or
because the assumption
on which this
prediction was based is false? Everyone expected
that One Big Union--
the slogan of the movement
--would strike and win wage increases for workers.
Yet
statistical evidence shows just the
contrary: strong unions do not strike but instead
restrain workers' wage demands.
It is
often worthwhile to help readers understand how
the research task grows from
the intellectual
history or current intellectual life of the
country or region that
generated it. Council
committees strive to build linkages among an
immense
diversity of national and
international intellectual traditions, and members
come
from various countries and schools of
thought. Many committee members are
interested
in the interplay of diverse traditions. In fact,
the chance to see intellectual
history in the
making is another reason people accept committee
membership. It is a
motive to which proposals
can legitimately appeal.
Adam Przeworski and
Frank Salomon, The Art of Writing Proposals
1988, 1995
5
It
pays to remember that topics of current salience,
both theoretical and in the so-
called real
world, are likely to be a crowded field. The
competitors will be more
numerous and the
competition less interesting than in truly
unfamiliar terrain.
Unless you have something
original to say about them, you may be well
advised to
avoid topics typically styled of
central interest to the discipline. Usually these
are
topics about which everyone is writing,
and the reason is that somebody else has
already made the decisive and exciting
contribution. By the time you write your
proposal, obtain funding, do the research, and
write it up, you might wish you were
working
on something else. So if your instinct leads you
to a problem far from the
course that the pack
is running, follow it, not the pack: nothing is
more valuable
than a really fresh beginning.
Describe Your Methodology
Methodological
canons are largely discipline-specific and vary
widely even within
some disciplines. But two
things can safely be said about methodological
appeal.
First, the proposal must specify the
research operations you will undertake and the
way you will interpret the results of these
operations in terms of your central
problem.
Do not just tell what you mean to achieve, tell
how you will spend your
time while doing it.
Second, a methodology is not just a list of
research tasks but an
argument as to why these
tasks add up to the best attack on the problem. An
agenda
by itself will normally not suffice
because the mere listing of tasks to perform does
not prove that they add up to the best
feasible approach.
Some popularly-used phrases
fall short of identifying recognizable research
operations. For example, I will look at the
relation between x and y is not
informative.
We know what is meant when an ornithologist
proposes to look at a
bird, but looking at a
relation between variables is something one only
does
indirectly, by operations like digging
through dusty archive boxes, interviewing,
observing and taking standardized notes,
collecting and testing statistical patterns,
etc. How will you tease the relationship of
underlying forces from the mass of
Adam
Przeworski and Frank Salomon, The Art of Writing
Proposals
1988, 1995
6
experience? The process of
gathering data and moving from data to
interpretation
tends to follow disciplinary
customs, more standard in some fields than in
others;
help readers from other fields
recognize what parts of your methodology are
standard, which are innovative. Be as specific
as you possibly can be about the
activities
you plan to undertake to collect information,
about the techniques you will
use to analyze
it, and about the tests of validity to which you
commit yourself. Most
proposals fail because
they leave reviewers wondering what the applicant
will actually
do. Tell them! Specify the
archives, the sources, the respondents, and the
proposed
techniques of analysis.
A
research design proposing comparison between cases
often has special appeal. In a
certain sense
all research is comparative because it must use,
implicitly or explicitly,
some point of
reference. Making the comparison explicit raises
its value as scientific
inquiry. In evaluating
a comparative proposal, readers ask whether the
cases are
chosen in such a way that their
similarities and differences illuminate the
central
question. And is the proposer in a
position to execute both legs of the comparison?
When both answers are positive, the proposal
may fare particularly well.
The proposal
should prove that the researcher either possesses,
or cooperates with
people who possess, mastery
of all the technical matters the project entails.
For
example, if a predominantly literary
project includes an inquiry into the influence of
the Tupian language on rural Brazilian
Portuguese, the proposal will be checked for
the author's background in linguistics andor
Indian languages, or the author's
arrangements
to collaborate with appropriate experts.
Specify Your Objectives
A well-composed
proposal, like a sonata, usually ends by alluding
to the original
theme. How will research
procedures and their products finally connect with
the
central question? How will you know if
your idea was wrong or right? In some
disciplines this imperative traditionally
means holding to the strict canon of the
Adam
Przeworski and Frank Salomon, The Art of Writing
Proposals
1988, 1995
7
falsifiable hypothesis. While
respecting this canon, committee members are also
open
to less formal approaches. What matters
is to convince readers that something is
genuinely at stake in the inquiry, that it is
not tendentiously moving toward a
preconceived
end, and that this leaven of the unknown will
yield interesting, orderly
propositions.
Proposals should normally describe the final
product of the project: an article, book,
chapter, dissertation, etc. If you have
specific plans, it often helps to spell them out,
because specifying the kind of journal in
which you hope to publish, or the kind of
people you hope to address, will help readers
understand what might otherwise look
like
merely odd features of the proposal. While
planning and drafting your proposal,
you
should keep in mind the program guidelines and
application procedures outlined
in the
brochure specific to the Council program to which
you are applying. If you
have specific
questions about the program, you may wish to
consult with a staff
member. Your final
proposal should include all requested enclosures
and appendices.
Final Note
To write a good
proposal takes a long time. Start early. Begin
thinking about your
topic well in advance and
make it a habit to collect references while you
work on
other tasks. Write a first draft at
least three months in advance, revise it, show it
to
colleagues. Let it gather a little dust,
collect colleagues' comments, revise it again. If
you have a chance, share it with a seminar or
similar group; the debate should help
you
anticipate what reviewers will eventually think.
Revise the text again for
substance. Go over
the language, style, and form. Resharpen your
opening paragraph
or first page so that it
drives home exactly what you mean as effectively
as possible.
Good luck.
Adam Przeworski
and Frank Salomon, The Art of Writing Proposals
1988, 1995
8