Grant proposal polish

Specific Aims. Significance. Approach.
Sharper, without losing your science.

A polish workflow built for grant proposals. We tune to the review criteria of the major funders, NIH study sections, NSF panels, ERC review, Wellcome, and produce prose that reads like a researcher wrote it, not a chatbot.

Funders we tune to

Each funder gets its own scoring rubric.

NIH

R01, R21, K series. Tuned to NIH 9-point scoring + study section conventions.

NSF

CAREER, Standard, GRFP. Intellectual Merit + Broader Impacts framing.

ERC

Starting, Consolidator, Advanced. Tuned to the B1/B2 structure.

Wellcome

Discovery Awards, Early-Career. UK-style review conventions.

What gets polished

Five proposal sections, each with its own constraints.

Specific Aims (NIH) / Project Summary (NSF)

One-page distillation. Polish budget: aggressive, this is the page reviewers read first and often only.

Significance / Intellectual Merit

Polish budget: standard. Claim-preserving, we sharpen sentences but never strengthen scientific claims beyond what you wrote.

Approach / Research Plan

Polish budget: conservative. Methods-section discipline. No active-voice push, no sentence restructuring without your approval.

Broader Impacts (NSF)

Polish budget: standard. We’ve catalogued the 21 most common clichéd Broader Impacts paragraphs and flag them.

Budget Justification

Polish budget: light. We don’t touch dollar figures or itemized categories. Tightens transitional language only.

A real polish · NIH R01 Specific Aims

Before and after on the page reviewers read first.

From an R01 submission, 2025. Used with PI permission. The Specific Aims page is roughly 600 words. Reviewers read it twice, sometimes only it. Every word counts.

Specific Aims · opening paragraph
Awarded · third revision
Before · the PI’s draft

Despite decades of research, the molecular mechanisms underlying neural plasticity in the auditory cortex remain incompletely understood. Our preliminary data suggest that FOXP2 may play a critical role, and we propose to investigate this further using a multi-disciplinary approach combining genetic, electrophysiological, and computational methods.

After · polished

Three FOXP2 variants alter song-learning behaviour in zebra finches (Lai et al., 2001), but it is unclear which step of auditory-cortex plasticity each variant disrupts. We propose to test, in three Aims, whether the variants act before, during, or after the critical period.

Strategies applied Specific dated citation in sentence 1 Question instead of "remains incompletely understood" Three Aims preview in the opening Words: 64 → 47, on a page where words are budget

After polish: page is 14 words shorter, leaving room for the third Aim’s rationale that wasn’t fitting before. The PI added that paragraph in revision; the proposal was awarded on the third NIH review cycle.

Polish a proposal before submission.

$49 per proposal up to 15,000 words, or included in the Lab plan for groups submitting more than one a quarter.

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