Week 7: Write the Sentence Your Reviewer Will Say Out Loud.
Field Notes from the Grant Cycle — Week 7
You have seven weeks until June 5. And this week I want to talk about the most important sentence in your application — a sentence most investigators never deliberately write.
It is the sentence your reviewer will say out loud in study section when they stand up to argue for your grant.
What Happens in the Room
After individual scoring, the reviewers assigned to your application present it to the full panel. They have roughly two to three minutes to summarize your project and make the case for its importance. In those minutes, they need to distill what you spent months writing into something a room full of tired scientists can hear, understand, and remember.
The reviewers who do this well are not inventing the argument on the spot. They are borrowing it from your application. They found a sentence — sometimes two — that captured the stakes of your work so clearly that they can lift it off the page and deliver it to the room almost verbatim.
The reviewers who struggle are the ones whose applicants never gave them that sentence. They have to construct the case themselves, pulling from different sections, paraphrasing, trying to synthesize an argument the investigator never made in one place. And when that happens — especially at hour seven or eight of a long day — the argument loses its edge. It becomes a summary instead of a case. And summaries do not move scores.
What a Borrowable Sentence Looks Like
A borrowable impact statement is specific, concrete, and consequential. It tells the reviewer — and through them, the room — exactly what is at stake and exactly what your project will change.
Here is what it is not: "This study will advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying health disparities in cancer screening."
That sentence is true. It may even be accurate. But it is not borrowable. A reviewer cannot stand up and deliver that sentence to a room and make anyone care, because it does not contain a population, a consequence, or a specific claim. It is a category description, not an argument.
Now consider: "This is the first study to test whether a community-based decision support intervention can eliminate the 23-percentage-point gap in lung cancer screening uptake between Black and white adults in the communities most affected by tobacco-related mortality."
That sentence names a population. It names a gap with a number. It names what the project will do about it. And it connects the intervention to the community that needs it most. A reviewer can stand up and say that sentence — or something very close to it — and the room hears a specific, verifiable, consequential claim. That is a sentence worth fighting for.
Where It Lives
Your borrowable sentence usually belongs in one of two places: the last paragraph of your Specific Aims page, or the impact statement at the end of your significance section. Ideally, it appears in both — not repeated word for word, but the same core claim, reinforced.
Some investigators bury their strongest claim deep in the Research Strategy, inside a paragraph about expected outcomes. By the time the reviewer finds it there, it is too late. The Aims page and the significance section are what the reviewer reads most carefully and what they return to when preparing their presentation for the panel. If your borrowable sentence is not in one of those two places, it functionally does not exist.
How to Write It
Open your application and search for the single strongest claim you make about what your project will accomplish. Not what it will study. Not what it will examine. What it will accomplish.
If you cannot find that sentence, you need to write it. Here is the formula — not as a template, but as a diagnostic:
Your sentence should contain three things: a specific action (what your project does), a specific population or context (who it serves or what gap it addresses), and a specific consequence (what changes if it works).
If any of those three is missing, the sentence is not borrowable. It is a description, and descriptions do not survive the compression of study section.
The Test
Read your sentence out loud. Then ask yourself: if a reviewer stood up in a room full of twenty scientists and said this sentence, would it make someone who has never read your application understand why this project matters?
If yes, you have it. Make sure it is on your Aims page and in your significance section.
If no, rewrite it until the answer is yes. This is not a writing exercise. It is the infrastructure your reviewer needs to advocate for you in a room you will never enter.
You have seven weeks. This sentence is worth an hour of your time this week. Maybe two. Because when funding lines are tight and every scored point matters, the difference between a grant that gets discussed and a grant that drifts is often the difference between a reviewer who had the words to fight for it and a reviewer who did not.
Give them the words.
Next week: the ten-minute audit that will show you every place your approach section asks a reviewer to trust you without giving them a reason.
Lisa Carter-Bawa, PhD, MPH, APRN, ANP-C, FAAN, FSBM
Creator, Lost in Translation Grantsmanship Curriculum | Soul to Soul Leadership LLC © 2026
Not sure where your grant is losing reviewers? Take the free Grant Translation Diagnostic — it takes about 10 minutes.
Go Deeper
The Lost in Translation Grantsmanship Curriculum teaches you how to write the sentences that survive study section — not by following formulas, but by understanding what your reviewer needs to advocate for your work. Module 1 is free.
