Pacing Tip: Trim Extra Words

To get funded, reviewers need to be excited by your grant from page 1. Yet reviewers are bored by many grants. It’s a chore to read them, partly because the pacing is slow. How do you fix slow pacing in your grant?

One tip to try: Trim extra words. Filler words drag your pace. They are cobwebs that take up reviewer headspace without adding insights.

For example, these phrases and words are filler that can be cut:

• “Research shows that.” If you are citing sources in the sentence, this phrase is redundant.
• “To the best of our knowledge.” This is implied. (Some will disagree on this point, preferring to foreground humility. I prefer to focus on pacing. As a grant writer, choose what matters to you.)
• Seeking to “better” understand. “Better” adds nothing here. Cut most adjectives and adverbs.

Try it! See what you could cut from this sentence. Cover up my answer to test your skills.

• Original: To our knowledge, current research demonstrates that up to 6.9% of mosquitos in Southeast Asia carry Dengue virus infections, based on a systematic review and metaanalysis of field-caught mosquitos (Maneerattanasak et al., 2024).
• Betty’s Rewrite: Up to 6.9% of field-caught mosquitoes in Southeast Asia carry Dengue virus infections (Maneerattanasak et al., 2024).

My rewrite is “punchier” because it’s shorter (18 words versus the original 34). You may disagree with my cuts - maybe you feel “metaanalysis” was a key idea. That’s fine. Keep it in your rewrite. The point is to carefully weigh each word to see if it builds your case. When you are brutal about cutting, you’ll have space for figures, white space, and ideas with stakes.

For more tips, see this free pre-submission checklist, a companion worksheet for The Grant Writing Guide. Figures, white space, and trimming extra words are lines 18 - 20. That’s no accident.

If you know someone who might like today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to them? Thank you, as always, for reading and believing that scholars deserve support for incredible ideas.

Betty

Stay in touch: The Newsletter, Bluesky, and The Grant Writing Guide book.

P.S. I’m studying creative writing this year, and trimming extra words applies to fiction too. Jordan Rosenfeld calls it cutting “throat clearing words,” meaning the words you say before you say anything important.

P.P.S. It’s whale watching season in Sydney. We’ve seen loads of pods traveling north. It’s stunning.