Week 9: Stop Writing and Start Talking.
Field Notes from the Grant Cycle — Week 9
You have nine weeks until June 5. And the most important thing you can do this week has nothing to do with writing.
I need you to have a conversation.
Find someone you trust — a colleague in a different field, a friend outside of academia, your partner, anyone who is willing to sit with you for ten minutes and listen. Then explain your research project to them as if you were having a conversation over coffee. No jargon. No grant language. No slides. Just: what is the problem, what are you going to do about it, and why will it matter.
Then pay attention to what happens.
What You Will Hear
I launched the Lost in Translation cohort at Mayo Clinic last week. Ten scholars. Strong science. Sharp minds. And the first exercise I gave them was exactly this one.
Here is what happened — the same thing that happens every time.
They started talking about their research, and within the first thirty seconds, something shifted. The language they use in their applications — the language they have been living inside for months or years — fell away. And what came out instead was clearer, more urgent, and more compelling than anything on their Specific Aims page.
One scholar described her project in two sentences that were better than her entire opening paragraph. She did not know it until she heard herself say it out loud.
That is what this exercise does. It forces you out of grant language and into human language. And the distance between those two things is your translation gap.
Why This Works
When you write a grant, you are performing. Not dishonestly — but you are writing for a context. You are thinking about review criteria, page limits, formatting, what the program announcement asked for, what your mentor told you to include. All of that is in the room with you while you write. And all of it pushes you toward a version of your project that sounds like a grant application instead of sounding like your actual idea.
When you talk to someone over coffee, all of that falls away. You are not performing. You are explaining. And the version that comes out — the plain, direct, urgent version — is almost always closer to what your reviewer needs to hear than the version on the page.
The reviewer does not need your grant language. They need your coffee language dressed in enough scientific precision to be credible. That is the translation.
How to Do This
Set a timer for five minutes. Explain your project to someone who is not in your field. Ask them to do two things while they listen:
First, notice where they get confused. Not politely confused — actually confused. Where do they stop tracking? Where does their face change? Where do they want to ask a question? Those moments are your translation gaps. They are the places in your application where a reviewer who is not an expert in your specific area will lose the thread.
Second, notice where they lean in. Where do their eyes widen? Where do they nod? Where do they say "oh, that's interesting" or "I didn't know that"? Those moments are your hooks. They are the parts of your project that create urgency, and they should be in your first paragraph — not buried on page seven of your Research Strategy.
After the conversation, open your Specific Aims page. Read your opening paragraph. Compare what you wrote to what you said.
If the written version is less clear than the spoken version, you have found the problem. And you have found it in ten minutes, without reading a single word of grantsmanship advice.
The Mistake to Avoid
The point of this exercise is not to write your grant the way you talk. Spoken language is imprecise. It wanders. It is not suitable for a scientific application.
The point is to find the core argument — the version of your project that lives underneath all the grant language you have layered on top of it. Once you have that, you translate it back into scientific writing. But now you are translating from clarity instead of building from convention.
Most investigators do it the other way around. They start with the structure — the template, the format, the expected sections — and try to fit their idea into it. The result is an application that sounds like a grant but does not feel like an argument. The reviewer can follow the structure. They cannot feel the urgency.
Start with the urgency. Then build the structure around it.
Your Assignment for This Week
Have the conversation. Five minutes. One person who is not in your field. Then compare what you said to what you wrote.
The gaps you find are the gaps your reviewer will find. Close them now, while you have nine weeks and the architecture of your application is still flexible enough to change.
Next week: the one paragraph in your significance section that carries more weight than any other — and what most investigators get wrong about it.
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.
Try the Exercise That Started It All
Module 1 of the Lost in Translation Grantsmanship Curriculum walks you through the diagnostic framework behind this exercise — and four others like it. It is free. Try it yourself.
