Why Good Grants Get Triaged: It's Not Your Science. It's the Translation.
You have just received the news. Your application was not discussed. The science you spent months developing, the aims page you revised twelve times, the approach section you built with painstaking detail—none of it was scored. Your grant was triaged.
The natural response is to question your science. Maybe the idea was not strong enough. Maybe the preliminary data were insufficient. Maybe the approach had a fatal flaw.
Sometimes those explanations are correct. But more often than most scientists realize, the problem is not the science itself. It is what happened to the science between the moment you understood it and the moment a reviewer tried to understand it. The meaning got lost in translation.
What Triage Actually Means
When an application is triaged, it means that the assigned reviewers scored it in the bottom half of applications and the study section decided not to discuss it. This is not the same as being reviewed and scored poorly. It means the reviewers could not construct a strong enough case for discussion. That distinction matters.
A reviewer who understands your project and sees its value will advocate for discussion, even if they have concerns about the approach. A reviewer who cannot quite grasp your argument—who has to work too hard to follow your logic, who cannot extract a clear statement of why this matters—will score it in the lower range and move on to the next application.
Triage is often a communication failure, not a scientific one.
Five Places Where the Translation Breaks Down
After years of writing grants, reviewing them for NIH, and studying the communication patterns that separate funded applications from triaged ones, I have identified five translation gaps—specific places where meaning gets lost between the applicant’s mind and the reviewer’s understanding.
The gap between your thinking and your writing. You know exactly what you mean. The logic is clear in your head. But when you sit down to write, you start performing “grant speak” instead of communicating. You reach for phrases like “it is well established that” and “there is a critical need for”—phrases that feel safe but add no meaning. The reviewer reads polished prose that does not actually say anything. This is the most common translation failure, and it happens before you even touch a template.
The gap between your words and their meaning. You write “examine.” The reviewer reads “vague.” You write “novel approach.” The reviewer reads “unproven.” Every word choice either closes the distance between you and the reviewer or widens it. Scientists often choose words that feel precise to them but create ambiguity for someone encountering the work cold.
The gap between your logic and their understanding. You have been living with this project for months or years. The logical connections between your aims feel obvious. But the reviewer has fifteen minutes to understand what took you months to develop. If your argument requires the reader to make inferential leaps—if any sentence does not build directly on the one before it—you lose them. And lost reviewers do not score well.
The gap between your confidence and their trust. You know you can execute this work. But reviewers have seen hundreds of applicants who overpromised. They are looking for evidence that your confidence is earned, not performed. Every methodological choice you justify builds trust. Every vague claim erodes it. Every unnecessarily defensive sentence—especially from early career investigators who hedge because they feel new—signals uncertainty rather than competence.
The gap between your vision and their advocacy. Here is what most applicants miss: the reviewer does not just score your grant. They must stand up in a room full of peers and argue for why your application deserves funding. If you have not given them the language to do that—a clear, memorable, two-sentence summary of why this work matters—they cannot be your advocate, no matter how much they like your science.
What This Means for Your Next Submission
If your grant was triaged, the instinct is to overhaul the science. Sometimes that is the right move. But before you redesign your study, read your application as a tired reviewer would at 11 PM. Ask yourself: Can someone who is not inside my head follow this argument sentence by sentence? Can they state, in two sentences, why this project matters? Can they explain what I am doing and why without referring back to the text?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, the problem may not be your science. It may be the translation.
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 Lost in Translation is free. It introduces the Coffee Conversation method—a 30-minute exercise that shows you exactly where the gap is between what you think and what you write. No templates. No jargon. Just the clearest version of your science.
