Selling Your Significance

Opening Words: an Analysis of How to Begin a National Science Foundation Narrative

Throughout these modules, we have emphasized that, perhaps more than any other question, reviewers will always return to a single clarifying question: what will be the ultimate result of giving you money? The general goal of proposal writing is to predict that future with credibility and clarity. From that perspective, almost anything might be relevant.

In addition to a core scholarly logic, stakeholder interests, your personal qualifications and access to facilities, and even trends in the private sector might all feed into the likelihood of impact. There may be an extensive track record of graduate and undergraduate students launching their careers with you. Various authorities might have identified your targeted topic as institutionally relevant. Outreach efforts may seem gauzy and unrealistic or built on a solid model of partnership and best practices. Everything services the desire to provide hard evidence of positive and important outcomes. But where does one begin? In the introductory paragraphs, NSF proposals significantly converge in style.

Consider the opening sentence. Here, we will always find an object of scholarly fascination that stakes out broader ground than the niche of the present proposal. What follows is a short scattering of excerpted opening sentences from proposals found through a brief Google search for NSF proposal samples online (note: we have tried to filter out any proposals that look as if they might have been unintentionally posted, for instance to a personal directory. If we've missed any, and you feel uncomfortable with having your proposal linked or used in this way, please contact us and it will be removed). Sometimes there is a brief summary section prior to this sentence; in other cases these are the first words that people see.

• "Among the most fundamental missions of biology are a complete global inventory of the species on our planet, and a natural classification of those species on the basis of their phylogenetic relationships; the importance of both missions is well delineated in the reports and recommendations of Systematics Agenda 2000 (1994)." (2002 Wheeler et. al)
• "The enigmas associated with the structure of ecological communities have long fascinated ecologists, from Darwin's tangled bank to the varied and complex questions currently populating the ecological literature about community assembly (e.g. Bell 2001, Hubbell 2001, Leibold et al. 2004, Chase 2005, Gotelli & McGill 2006)" (Philpott et. al)
• "In the past century a good deal of attention has been given to deterministic objects that 'behave as if they were random'. (The most famous objects of this sort come from number theory, but the phenomenon is much more general; see e.g. the "deterministic central limit theorem" of Jozsef Beck describing the number of lattice points in a certain family of triangular regions, as described in Matousek, 1999)." (Propp)
• "The TC [tropical cyclone] is a potentially destructive warm-core atmospheric vortex common to all tropical ocean basins." ( [note that a short section on objectives and significance precedes this opening sentence].

 The last excerpt, in its emphasis on the more socially durable motivator of destruction stands out in this group, reminiscent in its practicality of the opening sentences of NIH proposal; more often than not, these have a tight focus on disease statistics. Yet most of these openers focus on a topic of intellectual curiosity, sketched out in a manner as broad as it is concise.

The next step of the narrative, then, should be obvious.

Bridging from General Merit to the Area of Inquiry

It stands to reason that, if you stand on a broad landmass, you are probably going to be bridging to a more narrow one.  

a. From Phylogeny to the Phylogeny of Spiders

We begin with my personal favorite, from a proposal analyzed in another learning module on the role of teaching and explanation in grantwriting. The emphasis is mine; each bolded section represents a movement of the narrative from the general merits of phylogeny to the specific subject matter of the proposal, which is "a massive, comparative sampling of spider genomes" seeking in its scope and ambition to advance the phylogenetic mission of biology itself.

Among the most fundamental missions of biology are a complete global inventory of the species on our planet, and a natural classification of those species on the basis of their phylogenetic relationships; the importance of both missions is well delineated in the reports and recommendations of Systematics Agenda 2000 (1994). Phylogenetic classifications are scientific hypotheses that are crucial to all aspects of comparative biology; not only do they provide maximally efficient descriptions of the data on organismic attributes already at hand, they allow maximally effective predictions about the distributions of attributes not yet studied in detail.

Imagine that we find a newly discovered species, and are able to identify it as a spider (for example, by discovering that it has abdominal silk glands and spinnerets, features unique to spiders). From that information alone, we can predict, for example, that this new species will have male pedipalps that are modified for sperm transfer (another feature unique to spiders). We can also predict that it will have the features characteristic of the larger groups to which spiders belong; as an arachnid, we can predict that the newly discovered species will have two body regions and four pairs of legs; as an arthropod, we can predict that it will have jointed appendages, etc. Every grouping of species in a hierarchical classification enables such predictions, and the accuracy of the predictions depends on the degree to which the classification reflects the evolutionary history of the groups (i.e., the phylogenetic interrelationships of their component taxa).

Groups of organisms are not all equally well known, of course, either in terms of inventorying all their component species, or of understanding the interrelationships among those species already described. Estimates of species richness yet to be discovered range from about 8 million to 100 million species (Hammond, 1992), and only for the most conspicuous groups of large organisms (vertebrate animals, green plants) are we at all close to having a complete global inventory of species. Unfortunately, vertebrate animals and green plants together represent only about 3% of the world's biota (and quite possibly the least representative 3% at that; Hammond, 1992; Platnick, 1999). This historical bias against smaller and less conspicuous organisms is also evident in the phylogenetic aspects of systematics, where it has severely hampered comparative biology. Groups whose interrelationships are poorly understood are often actively avoided by the research community as model subjects for inquiry, leading to a vicious circle of continuing, comparative neglect.

It is for all these reasons that the report of a recent NSF-sponsored workshop on "Assembling the Tree of Life: Research Needs in Phylogenetics and Phyloinformatics" calls for a major new initiative to resolve the basic outlines of the Tree of Life, with emphasis on the deeper branches of the tree (i.e., the oldest and most diverse groups). We propose here to focus on spiders (Araneae), as a group that is an especially well-suited target for this initiative, by combining a massive, comparative sampling of spider genomes -- something never before undertaken, and only now achievable with an equally thorough synthesis of the existing and new morphological and behavioral data on the same set of taxa.

The general structure of the argument is clear to see. First, phylogeny is said to matter; next, vertebrates and plants are proposed to be overemphasized and inconspicuous invertebrates neglected, and an NSF workshop report cited to confirm this claim; finally, we narrow in on spiders as the ideal area. With this, the introduction ends. If you are curious about where it goes next, the section title that follows is clear enough: "Why Spiders?" Thus, the authors keep laying out an argument bridging from the merits of phylogeny to the merits of spider phylogeny. Keep that in mind in your own proposal. It is often a good choice to build your sections around such simple, intuitive questions. Oh, you're going to do a massive phylogenetics study of spiders? Well, why spiders? The subsequent section header is also wonderfully intuitive: "Why Now?"

 If that is the general movement, it's worth digging just a little into the rhetorical subtlety of the above excerpt, in which the merits of phylogeny are proclaimed through the example of spiders without yet claiming that spiders are particularly noteworthy. This decision allows for a nice efficiency through dual purposes--in the midst of a defense of phylogeny, the reader is getting a casual refresher on where some of the basic features of spiders are located on a phylogenetic hierarchy. 

b. From Community Structure to Terrestrial Community Structure

The following excerpt, an opening paragraph, exhibits a high degree of structural similarity to other opening paragraphs. The main difference is in that opening goal, in content and tone both. It feels very different from, say, the hard and specific mortality figures of an NIH opening; there is more of a sense of curiosity and fascination borne of a long intellectual tradition. The goal is not curing a disease but untangling enigmas. As in NIH proposals which propose to advance the field as opposed to reach the end goal of a cure, this project does not promise to resolve a question that has been fascinating ecologists for centuries, but rather to make a notable advance within that broad tradition.

With that difference noted, the key is for us is in the similarity—the structure. All of this should be familiar.

WHERE DOES THE EMPHASIS BELONG? The enigmas associated with the structure of ecological communities have long fascinated ecologists, from Darwin's tangled bank to the varied and complex questions currently populating the ecological literature about community assembly (e.g. Bell 2001, Hubbell 2001, Leibold et al. 2004, Chase 2005, Gotelli & McGill 2006). Several theories outline mechanisms for species co-existence at both local and regional scales (Chesson 2000, Amarasekare et al. 2004, Holyoak et al. 2006). In the case of ecological dynamics, categorization of mechanisms into those that operate at a local level (e.g. interspecific competition, differing resource requirements, predation) and those that operate at a more regional level (e.g. dispersal, recruitment limitation) remains a useful framing (Ricklefs 1987). It is a framework that has been applied most frequently to sessile organisms like plants (e.g. Hubbell 2001, Foster et al. 2004, Tilman 2004, Karst et al. 2005). Due to their intrinsic mobility, this community assembly framework has not been commonly applied for terrestrial (or tropical) animals (but see Cottenie & DeMeester 2004, McCauley 2007). (Conceptual framework, first paragraph, emphasis mine)

One only has to read the last sentence to see the trend of thought. If we find the right community or methodology, this framework can be transplanted to terrestrial animals. And a variety of skeptical questions are parried away. Has this framework not been applied to terrestrial animals due to lack of interest? No! The root cause of absence is practicality—"their intrinsic mobility." If there is interest in sessile organisms, there is interest in terrestrial. If your expectation, then, is that the subsequent discussion will hinge on justifying many of these practicalities, such as the study location, the species chosen, and the experimental design, you would be right.

I like the way that they deal with supporting and contradictory literature here. The examples of "sessile organisms like plants" are provided with an e.g. Similarly, the relative absence of similar studies on terrestrial animals nevertheless acknowledges that some such examples do exist, but contextualize them with a "but see..." which is to say acknowledging the contradiction but not dwelling on it too long. On a side note, I categorize this as a certain sort of study, in which principle comes first. Though there will certainly be inherent merit claimed to the species (in this case, twig-nesting ants), the framing of the proposal begins with no mention of that subject detail. We begin with principle. Only later will the authors invoke ants as a specific case study ideal for the exploration of these ideas.

b. Read This Paragraph to Know What Will Happen if This Project is Funded (Eastin, NSF Atmospheric Sciences)

Here is a bit more practical opening—even closer to the NIH examples seen so far than the previous. Structurally, they are again highly similar. Yet I want to highlight something else, a tendency that has been true of almost every example cited so far, whether from the NIH, NEH, or, here, the NSF. The common feature, if one squints enough, is that they are all a particular form of a promise. Admittedly, it requires a bit of reinterpretation to see it. The perspective of a reviewer, as mentioned in the introduction to this section, involves the fundamental and primary concern of defining a likely outcome. What will happen if we fund this proposal?

WHERE DOES THE EMPHASIS BELONG? The TC is a potentially destructive warm-core atmospheric vortex common to all tropical ocean basins. Recent advances in our understanding of the basic physics governing the TC have yielded significant improvement in the forecasting of storm track. The associated forecasts of storm intensity, however, have not shown the same improvement due to an incomplete understanding of the complex external and internal processes which influence intensity (Elsberry et al. 1992; DeMaria and Kaplan 1999). In particular, it is well known that latent heat release in the TC eyewall is crucial for maintenance of the warm core, but the nature, timing, location, and intensity of the heating and its interaction with (and feedback on) the primary vortex are not well understood. (emphasis mine)

So that's the question. Why does this proposal exist, and what will happen if we give it money? In this one paragraph, the proposal—in the sense of what the authors actually propose to do—is not even mentioned. And yet we have that whole story. It is easy to extrapolate, even without a title, project summary, or any supporting details, what this proposal will be about just from these three opening sentences.

To rephrase the basic idea of it:

Imagine "if the nature, timing, location, and intensity of the heating and its interaction with (and feedback on) the primary vortex" were better understood. Forecasts of storm intensity would soon catch up with forecasts on storm track, the latter of which have raced ahead in quality. And that is a nice logical hook: why haven't our storm-intensity forecasts been keeping up with our storm-track forecasts?

There is a big lesson in this brief story. The first aspect of good writing is preempting skeptical questions, yes. But why are stories the antidote? Well, they unfold one step at a time, raising and answering their own questions.

Why haven't our storm-intensity forecasts been keeping up with our storm-track forecasts?

It is a very natural question, if one reads that storm track forecasting has paced ahead while storm intensity forecasting hasn't. And the proposal immediately answers it—a particular gap in our knowledge has prevented it. But the broader answer is—if you fund this proposal, that gap will disappear, and the forecasts will improve.

Just because a promise is implicit does not make it difficult to see.

c. A Familiar Pattern in a New Location (Verbruggen, Australian Research Council)

Similar logical structures exist throughout proposals, not merely in the opening sections that we have largely been focused on, and not merely in NSF proposals. Consider what should by now be an exceedingly obvious structural similarity here—a general goal, an obstacle identified, the pinpointing of a root cause in the middle of both paragraphs ("due to"), and concluding with an actionable takeaway—but at the same time notice the differences rooted in different locations. Where the prior excerpt was clearly an introduction to the topic, and therefore at the broadest scales, this one represents only one of several aims within a proposal. From this excerpt, we do not know why this knowledge gap matters, or how it fits into a bigger picture. Yet, presuming that a previous discussion has established the importance of this objective, then the paragraph is highly effective in very quickly arriving at a root cause and an actionable takeaway.

WHERE DOES THE EMPHASIS BELONG? A second knowledge gap is the phylogenetic affinities of the dinoflagellate plastids. It is known that dinoflagellates have independently initiated symbioses at least five times from plastids of various origins [41], but the exact origins of the plastids have remained difficult to pinpoint. In this case, the problem is not a lack of information about the lineages that sprouted the plastid, but is due to the paucity of sequence data of the dinoflagellates themselves. In dinoflagellates, plastid genes are often transferred to the nucleus while the endosymbiont genome deteriorates to a few minicircles [42,43]. I aim to sequence the minicircles and the plastid genes transferred to the nucleus of six dinoflagellates belonging to three plastid types. (emphasis mine)

Likewise, reading through the lens of likely outcome may again rearrange into an implicit promise: this proposal will fill the knowledge gap regarding the phylogenetic affinities of the dinoflagellate plastids. Previous paragraphs will have linked that objective to larger purposes, and ultimately to merit and impact.
Any result, however large or small, should have an accompanying logical structure that shows how its impact will be amplified.

d. The Intellectual History of a Concept (McCarty, NSF Cultural Anthropology)

Concepts are not merely ideas, they are tools. They can yield new insights when applied to existing data, and also suggest new types of data to look for. Like any other tool, they can be carried over to new disciplines, with an associated process of modification and repurposing. Tracing a single concept through time reveals something of our changing intellectual priorities—a potentially useful context if one seeks to engage in a new round of modification and repurposing.

I've consistently favored introductory sections throughout this module and stick to that pattern here. Within that context of general brevity, however, I'd like to reproduce close to the full introduction (only the research objectives, and a last summarizing paragraph, are removed). Just know that the discussion does not end here. Much of the depth comes later. But this captures the big story that is being told in a very readable manner. If you are in a hurry, just read the bolded sentences (emphasis mine). Also, one other disclaimer—I am not a cultural anthropologist, but this proposal was funded in 2004. We are reading it as a story and narrative, not as a perfect representation of the state-of-the-art.

The concept of acculturation has evolved during the past century, adapting to dramatic changes in population flows within and between countries and continents. Acculturation was originally conceived by turn-of-the-century anthropologists as a cross-cultural phenomenon explaining the similarities of cultural traits between relatively small and geographically defined groups. It was adopted by sociologists and social psychologists in the 1940s to explain the adaptation of primarily European migrants to the U.S. and Canada. Acculturation then became an independent variable in models to explain phenomena of interest to policy-makers, such as civic participation or risky and illegal behaviors.

No longer a broad concept used to study the fundamental underpinnings of the development of culture traits, it became a pragmatic tool used by researchers and policy-makers to understand how best to integrate migrants into a large host culture. This goal was at odds with its original usage by anthropologists to understand how culture was formed and compare cultures; those who studied acculturation were now more concerned with the contact between two specific cultures and the consequences of that contact. This resulted in context-dependent acculturation scales that were not used outside of the specific cultures and geographic context for which they were designed.

During the past decade, the world has witnessed yet another change in the pattern of international migration. Where migrants from developing countries once migrated to developed countries to stay, many now take advantage of low-cost and fast public transportation and (what were) looser border restrictions to move back and forth between their home and host countries. Many have observed migrants now often derive their identity from both countries simultaneously. While current scales of acculturation attempt to capture active influences from both origin and host countries using multidimensional scales, we are looking for ways to measure adjustment to a host culture that transcends individual cultural differences.

Personal network research is ideally suited to capture these influences as a complement to current acculturation scales. Indeed, personal networks were originally conceived by Radcliffe-Brown as the web of relations that surround an individual and seen as a sound alternative to traditional anthropological approaches when explaining cultural traits within African mining towns where members tended to travel frequently between their village community and the mining community. Rather than conceiving of a culture as only place-oriented, Radcliffe-Brown and others recognized people live within a social envelope of their own that is sometimes place-oriented, and other times not.

Given that the interaction of people with their network members has without question a large influence on forming attitudes and behaviors, adapting personal network methods to the existing advances of scales of acculturation is an ideal solution to understanding acculturation in the context of transnationalism. By understanding how personal network composition and structure affect attitudes and behaviors, and how patterns of composition and structure evolve across cultural and geographic contexts, we mark a return to the objective of anthropologists to understanding the fundamentals of culture formation, while retaining the value of acculturation as an independent variable to explain dependent variables of interest. In a time when culture is increasingly less identifiable by the place of origin or so-called race of people, and more by how they interact, a personal network approach that focuses on interaction is a logical extension of the concept of acculturation. Two research objectives suggest several testable hypotheses:

e. A Compressed Opening (Propp, NSF Combinatorics #1)

This is not the first example we have seen of an opening paragraph that begins with a call to a century-long fascination and ends with an actionable takeaway. What sets this apart is that it dispenses altogether with the bridge between these two elements. Other than a parenthetical, this opening paragraph is only two sentences long.

In the past century a good deal of attention has been given to deterministic objects that "behave as if they were random". (The most famous objects of this sort come from number theory, but the phenomenon is much more general; see e.g. the "deterministic central limit theorem" of Jozsef Beck describing the number of lattice points in a certain family of triangular regions, as described in Matousek, 1999). There is a need for a flexible kind of probability theory whose theorems will draw their inspiration from traditional probability theory but will have weaker hypotheses, replacing assumptions of randomness by assumptions that deal with individual instances rather than probability distributions.

A certain grace is taken from the combination of clear and confident direction, logic that is subtle but also intuitive and easy to follow, and generally well-phrased sentences serving that logical thrust.

f. A Concept by Many Names, Appearing in Different Fields, with Different Aims (Propp NSF Combinatorics #2)

This proposal is written by a well-established figure in his area of mathematics, a fact revealed in both content and style. The writing is somewhat more discursive than the norm, and it is a bit more casual in some phrasings, including the acknowledgment of uncertainty (i.e. "I had not thought the latter would be a promising direction...[but] there may be something here worth looking at"). In all his writing is a strong sense of narrative, and an anticipation of the sort of reader questions endemic to the genre of grantwriting. The following literature review traces a single concept into many disciplines, each of which has bestowed it with a different name and a slightly different implementation. The defining feature of his own implementation is a tie-in to probability theory, and it is through this lens that each item is evaluated. In terms of how I read it, I see a great deal of similarities with the previous section titled The Intellectual History of a Concept, but this time traversing even more fields.

I have been calling low-discrepancy routing mechanisms "rotor-routers", or "rotors"; Cooper and Spencer, in building on my ideas, use the term "P-machines" to describe gadgets that are built out of rotor-routers...An earlier version of the idea of low-discrepancy deterministic quasirandom simulation of random walk was invented by Arthur Engel in his work on the "probabilistic abacus" (Engel, 1975 and 1976). Engel's mechanism was reinvented by others and studied under the heading of "the chip-firing game" (see Anderson et al., 1989; Bj¨orner et al., 1991; Bj¨orner and Lov´asz, 1992; Eriksson, 1996; Biggs, 1997; Biggs and Winkler, 1997; and Biggs, 1999) and "the abelian sandpile model" (Bak et al., 1988; Dhar, 1990; Creutz, 1996; and Cori and Rossin, 2000), but these reincarnations of Engel's idea tended to hide rather than clarify the link with random walk. Also, the chip-firing game effectively lumps together and entangles different sample paths; the approach to quasirandomness taken in this proposal features individual samplepaths, and this makes it easier to carry over ideas from probability theory to the quasirandom context.

A version of the rotor idea can be found in the physics literature, where it is called the Eulerian walks model (Priezzhev et al., 1996), and it can also be found in the computer science literature (Rabani et al., 1998), but in both cases the point of view is very different from mine, and the link with foundations of probability theory is absent. Work on quasi-Monte Carlo methods, such as recent work of Owen and Tribble (2004), is grounded in an outlook similar to mine, but the methods and constructions are rather different. The closest link I have found between my ideas and other people's work is the "whirling tours" algorithm of Dumitriu, Tetali, and Winkler (Dumitriu et al., 2003).

The rotor scheme for quasirandom walk, when compared with the chipfiring scheme, introduces some extra structure and breaks some symmetries, but in return one gains a great deal. In particular, chip-firing can be problematic on fairly simple infinite graphs, whereas rotor-routing works extremely well even on some non-recurrent infinite graphs (though why it works as well as it does is still largely mysterious)...Ander Holroyd and I have studied phenomena like this for random walks on other graphs, and have been able to show that, for those graphs, the discrepancy |A(N) − pN| stays bounded. However, our proof requires hypotheses that do not apply to Z2...One of our goals is to prove quasirandom laws of large numbers for occupation probabilities, hitting probabilities, and hitting times for a broad class of infinite graphs, including Z2...

I've snipped enough words and context that you won't be able to follow a few references towards the end (the discrepancy |A(N) − pN|, for instance, refers to content that has been cut). Excepting these references, this excerpt is clear to follow, even without having read the proposals' opening sections. Beyond this the literature review continues, but it begins increasingly to thread in research objectives, and then approach. Differences from the literature are then linked to their strengths and potential applications. The general structure that we have seen is a drive to identify underlying similarity, followed by the clean delineation of difference in regards to the central goal of this proposal. In drawing those differences, we end up hearing about applications to

1. "reaction-diffusion equations,"

2. "the study of the Diaconis-Fulton smash product,"

3. "the study of two-sided erosions, and to the study of 'ordinary' DLA (see Halsey, 2000); I had not thought the latter would be a promising direction, since rotor mechanisms seem unlikely as sources of fractal fingering, but Oded Schramm has done some simulations that suggest that there may be something here worth looking at," and

4. "Finally, in parallel with my explorations of specific topics, I will try to understand simple properties of quasirandom analogues of fundamental constructions in discrete probability theory."

Because we are coming from an extended delineation of novelty, all of these objectives—and any merit that belongs to them—inherit that novelty. In that sense, though this proposal in many respects feels different from a number of grant proposals, it still benefits from many of the techniques common to the genre. A number of proposals that I have analyzed, for instance, reflect a similar ordering, of novelty claims within a literature review leading into a more precise delineation of research objectives and merit.

This passage also serves to highlight that there are different types of literature reviews, even in an overarching sense. Stated broadly, this is a review of a similar underlying concept being implemented towards different aims. But, as we have seen elsewhere, a diametrically opposed sort of literature review might be one involving different methods being applied towards the same aim. Being able to perceive the sort of argument that you are trying to make in this regard can not only help to focus it farther, and sharpen that fundamental argument, but help to understand what it needs. If the aim is what differs, then more time needs to be paid towards the goal of explaining why your unique aim matters. If it is the vice versa, then an extended discussion of approach may be in order.

Contact:
Nural Akchurin, Associate Dean for Research
College of Arts & Sciences
806.834.8838
nural.akchurin@ttu.edu