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How to Narrow the Focus of Your Grant

I begin each of my grant training workshops by asking participants to share the ideas they want funded. Inevitably, responses are broad and need to be narrowed to be doable. This is true of both project and research grant seekers. As we proceed through the various components of the proposal, the necessity of narrowing the focus becomes obvious. This is first realized when we set out to develop measurable objectives and specific aims. If a focused idea can be chosen before this stage, the whole process becomes a lot easier. So, how can this be done?

Focusing the idea

  • Begin by choosing any idea that you wish to develop, for example, diabetes in children.
  • Be more specific about your idea: diabetes and cellular damage in children.
  • Be even much more specific: cellular damage during the beginning and later stages of diabetes in young children and adolescents.

Focusing the subjects

During the first three steps you narrowed your idea. To some, this idea may seem like it’s ready to be written about, but the level of precision required in the context of academic writing requires youto go through a few additional steps. These are:

  • Make each one of the subjects of your idea more specific. In this case, it could be the type of diabetes, such as diabetes 1 and 2 and cellular damage during those stages.
  • At this juncture, you can write a full sentence with all the subjects that you have narrowed. This might be: The aim of this study is to determine whether oxidative cellular damage occurs at the clinical onset of diabetes and in later stages of the disease in young children and adolescents.

Developing the aims/objectives

The next step will be developing specific aims/objectives that can be tested/measured. These have to be extremely specific. For example: ”Indicative parameters of lipoperoxidation, protein oxidation, and changes in the status of antioxidant defense systems will be evaluated in single blood samples from 54 diabetic children, adolescents, and young adults and 60 healthy age- and sex-matched control subjects.” (Carmen Dominquez, Oxidative Stress at Onset and in Early Stages of Type 1 Diabetes in Children and Adolescents).

Now that you have developed specific aims/objectives, you will need to assess if you will have sufficient funds and time to undertake the project, given the scope of the grant. A Gantt Chart that times each of your activities will be your best aid. You will also need to budget each of your activities to ensure that you are requesting sufficient funds for your project.

Focusing your idea is a key undertaking to preparing a proposal that is productive and doable. You may very well begin with a broad idea, however, the literature review and preliminary data should provide insight into which words and topics can be narrowed. Focused and specific aims/objectives that can be accomplished during the time and within the budget that the grant allows will be the indication that you are now ready to proceed with your submission. This being the case, ensuring that every word choose is very focused, will lead you to a proposal that has a good chance of being funded.

Mathilda Harris

Over the past 18 years, she has written grants, conducted capital campaigns, developed strategic plans for grant procurement, and assisted individuals and institutions to write winning proposals for various donors.

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