Grant Proposals
Why pre-review grant proposals? What I said about manuscripts applies even more to grants. Rule number 1: do not frustrate the reviewers of your grant! Poorly-written proposals can really annoy the reviewers, because they have to read the defective area(s) several times to divine your meaning, and that wastes time. Even worse, poor use of English can result in reviewers mis-interpreting your intentions, which could lead to rejection of your proposal. A proposal full of punctuation or formatting errors can give the impression that the authors did not care enough to thoroughly proof-read it, thus reflecting badly on their scientific and organizational credibility. A bad review can jeopardize assessment of your proposal in the next round even after careful re-writing. So it is preferable by far to present the best-written proposal possible the first time. Remember that a less than “outstanding” score will usually result in the need to rewrite your proposal, so you lose several months and sometimes a whole year before the next submission date. This translates into a substantial loss of potential funding.
As with manuscripts, I will examine your grant proposal word by word, checking for all kinds of errors. In addition, I will comment on scientific aspects of the proposal, including ambiguities, conflicting statements, budgetary anomalies and, where possible, factual errors. The latter is why I restrict my services to proposals in reproductive biology.