A New Way to Win Your Next Grant

1. A recent testimonial
2. How the Study Section Works
3. Dr. George Gopen's UNIQUE AND POWERFUL SCHOLARSHIP FOR CLEARLY WRITTEN AND CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD COMMUNICATION
4. A Brief Summary – Successful Written Communication:
A New Way to Win Your Next Grant
 
1. A recent testimonial

Dear Dr Gopen,
 
I am writing to thank you for your courses and textbooks. In the summer of 2023, I was fortunate enough to come across your work. Thereafter, during my final year at Oxford, applying your advice not only resulted in a drastic improvement in my tutorial essays but also culminated in a first-class degree.
 
For comparison, in the year before I was exposed to the Reader Expectations Approach, only two of my six examination essays received first-class marks. In contrast, having watched your video series and read through both of your textbooks, I received first-class marks in all three of my final year essay exams. As further evidence of your approach’s remarkable insight, my six-thousand-word research project has been both awarded a prize within Oxford and also nominated for a UK-wide competition. 
 
During my first two years at Oxford University, I was hindered by the constant fear that I wrote poorly. Moreover, as you remark during your video series, conventional feedback on written essays is often obscure with respect to how one should extrapolate from a given in-line comment onto a more general improvement. (‘Oh yes! I’ll be certain not to make the same mistake when I write that exact sentence again!’).
 
And whilst your approach does not offer rules per se, the frame of mind regarding expectations has been invaluable. Thanks to your work, I am no longer mosquito-pecked by an ever-present apprehension that my sentences do not ’sound’ right. 
 
In sum, I thank you for your work. Not only have my grades improved, but so, too, has my confidence in writing. If ever you are passing by the University of Oxford, please know that a copy of ‘Expectations’ is held at the library of Harris Manchester College, at the request of one Rick Longley. 
 
All the best,
Andrei ‘Rick’ Longley
                                       * * * *

                                                                                                                                      NIH Study Section Meeting

2.  How the Study Section Works
 
Re: Study Section Success Predicts Research Funding Success
Greetings to all those who participate in grant-funded research –
 
Every grant application that makes it into the hands of a study section reviewer represents a large effort and expense on the part of many people.  Yet, 80% of those applications will proceed no further than the study section and, therefore, will not be funded.  Thus, for 80% of all grant applications, 100% of the expense and the effort has been completely for naught. It cannot be that 80% of all grant applications are deficient in the important areas of research strategy, persuasiveness of preliminary studies, or budget details.  Something else is going on. 

Simply put, the downfall of most failed grant applications is highly likely to stem from the quality of the writing.  And truth to tell, that is the result of our educational systems’ always having taught writing inadequately.  We are happy to announce the arrival of a new writing scholarship that can be learned by professional adults;  it has proved remarkably successful.  Schools teach writing primarily so students can have success in school; so all that instruction is centered on the writer.  In the world of scientific research, the important person is not the writer; it is the reader.  In that professional world, the quality of writing is judged by the answer to one simple question: Did the reader get delivery of what the writer was trying to send?  If the answer is “yes,” the writing was good enough; if “no,” it was not.  So to get better control of the writing process, we need to understand how readers read. This paradigm shift in education is the work of Dr. George Gopen, J.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric, Duke University.
 
Take a look at Dr. Gopen’s website – https://GeorgeGopen.com – where you can explore his remarkable and revolutionary approach to the English language.  “Productive”?  At Duke University alone, Dr. Gopen’s new approach has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding for people who, before learning Dr. Gopen’s insights, had experienced little or no success. 

 At present, the National Institutes of Health annually makes available $50B of research funding.  In order for scientists to access these monies, they need to be successful in submitting a competitive and persuasive written  proposal.  Yet another $50B of research funds can be accessed by submitting written proposals to NSF, CMRDP, the Department of Energy, and a number of other sources.  With all this money available, the reality is that much of the competition for funding is actually a competition that rewards those who produce the better writing.  Those who understand and practice Gopen’s Reader Expectation Approach to the English Language tend to win every time.

Here at https://GeorgeGopen.com, you can learn what you need to know about how readers go about reading. It is not hyperbole to claim this can dramatically change your life for the better – now and forever.

To repeat and therefore emphasize: If you will learn how readers go about reading, and if you will refashion your writing with this new understanding of how written communication actually works, you will succeed and thrive beyond your wildest dreams.  Promise.

Barbara Y. Croft, Ph.D., FSNMMI, FACNM

3.  Dr. George Gopen's
UNIQUE AND POWERFUL SCHOLARSHIP FOR CLEARLY WRITTEN AND CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD COMMUNICATION
 
Scientific researchers cannot do their work if they cannot achieve consistent success in two crucial activities – securing grant funding and publishing their results in professional journals. Both of these activities depend – to a far greater extent than most people realize – on the quality of the researcher’s writing. Therefore, nothing can be more important to scientific researchers than finding a way to increase the quality of their competitive writing. Nothing.
 
For scientists – and we dare to say for a majority of scientists -- poorly written, uncommunicative writing is their Achilles’ heel. Before you take umbrage at this negative opinion, let us explain what we mean by “poorly written.” We are not referring to grammatical errors nor excessive length nor improper word choice.   Instead, we define poor writing as writing that fails successfully to communicate the writer’s thoughts to the reader’s mind. This happens far more often than most people realize.
When a reader successfully travels from the capital letter at the beginning of a sentence all the way to its period, the reader wants to believe the sentence has adequately expressed the writer’s thoughts. But just because the sentence made some sense does not necessarily mean that the reader has perceived the sense the writer intended. If the sentence failed to deliver its intended meaning, quickly and clearly, the sentence was “poorly written.”
 
How can a writer greatly increase the odds that any given sentence will mean for readers what it was intended to mean? That question is answered by Dr. George Gopen’s new way of understanding the writing and reading processes. He calls this new way of thinking the Reader Expectation Approach to the English Language (REA).  In it, he explains, in a completely new and revolutionary fashion, how readers go about the activities of reading and interpreting.   Knowing how readers do these activities empowers the writer not only over their own writing process and over the reader’s reading process, but also over the writer’s thinking process. Writing better will make you think better. Understanding REA furnishes writers with techniques that increase the likelihood that readers will get the intended meaning of any given sentence. Applying REA significantly increases the ability to get funded and get published.
 
In a scientific marketplace where only 20% are likely to be funded in any given funding period, no one can afford their writing not to be superior. If your ideas penetrate clearly and easily to the minds of those reviewing the research, your application will clearly stand out from the sea of poorly written applications with which it is in competition. Greatly improved writing turns into greater funding and publishing success -- the stuff of which successful careers are made.  
 
To get some sense of what REA is all about, visit our website: GeorgeGopen.com. On the main menu, first click on “Writings” and then on “Articles.” There you will find the three important essays Dr. Gopen has published in American Scientist. Read the oldest (and shortest) one first: “The Science of Scientific Writing.” You will also find 70 more articles, the most relevant of which make up a 42-article series he published for the American Bar Association journal Litigation.
 
Learning what he has to teach you can change the quality of your professional life. Promise.
 
Barbara Y. Croft, Ph.D,, FSNMMI, FACNM
[email protected]

 
 
4.  A Brief Summary - Successful Written Communication: A New Way to Win Your Next Grant  
Successful written communication is not a matter of right or wrong: successful written communication is a matter of what works. “What works” is what we teach.  To our knowledge no one else really understands how to define or explain “what works”.
 
Through more than 45 years, George Gopen has been discovering and developing a way to teach writers of English how to make sure that their reader understands what the writer intended. His discoveries have produced The Reader Expectation Approach To The English Language. 
 
On the one hand, his work is revolutionary: on the other hand; to all of his audiences it makes immediate sense.  It is hard to use, because it requires that you work against deeply ingrained habits that have been developed over a lifetime of writing.
 
Those who do make the effort to apply what they have learned report astonishing success.
Many people who had never succeeded in getting a single grant proposal funded report that now they are being successful every time they apply.
 
Barbara Y Croft, Ph.D., FSNMMI, FASNM