A Guide to Writing a Grant Application

Dr. Doug Landsittel taught a free online course on comparative effectiveness research (CER) available to people underrepresented in the clinical research community. Much of the course was intended to be practical as well as conceptual, including a focus on writing about your research in grant proposals. The problem was that learners in this course were busy people in institutions already stretched thin. They did not have long blocks of time to write and, since there was no tuition, it was easy for them to put off writing between class sessions. I designed this workbook to address these problems specific to this audience. The workbook is based on a grant application from one of the major CER funding institutions and breaks the writing part into a series of short questions. Instead of trying to write a few paragraphs on a general topic, the workbook had students write one sentence on several smaller, more specific topics. Later sections of the workbook helped writers combine their short answers into longer and more effective paragraphs that could be copied and pasted into a grant application.