How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

It doesn’t matter if your proposal is good, or even great, in its own right—it must be better than most of the other proposals, and nearly all of them are pretty good.

No matter how humble your field of scholarship might be, it’s yours. Your home field—your primary scholarly topic—is where you have the highest profile and the strongest reputation.

seahorse seeks success through volume and probability; its natural habitat is wherever soft-money jobs are found,

Seahorses, in contrast, submit to a huge set of sponsors. Federal agencies, large charities, small foundations, local nonprofits, random passersby with change jingling loudly in their pockets—they’ll all get proposals.

Other scholars are grant seahorses. Because they churn out proposals, they’re not emotionally attached to any single one and know that most of them will be eaten by the crustaceans on the review panel.

From the beginning, then, you need a “grants, not a grant” mind-set. The decision, for example, is not “Should I write an NEH fellowship?” but “Should I submit an NEH fellowship proposal at least every few years until I get one?”

seahorses, give birth to thousands of babies but invest little in them. What’s your grant-writing species?

isn’t worth learning how to plan, write, and submit grant proposals if you intend to submit only one.

Writing your first grant is like teaching your very first class—there’s so much more to it than you thought. But your second time teaching that class is much easier, and the third is easier still.