Writing with head Vs Writing with heart
How emotive should your grant writing be?
Capturing the right tone in your grant application is essential – striking the right balance between professional and engaging means your reader will find your application both credible and compelling.
On a scale of ‘writing with heart’ to ‘writing with the head’, grant writing is positioned towards the factual end of things, but should still include enough ‘heart’ to be engaging.
Consider that reviewers often read dozens of applications in a day – dry, crammed and repetitive writing will make your application get lost in the pile.
In general, you should aim for a ‘quality newspaper’ tone that is clear, evidence-based and interesting.
Think of a Sunday morning newspaper magazine, with a feature story that introduces you to a new topic and makes you care about it. Writing such as this will include an emotive story line that captures an educated reader, which is then strongly supported by numerous facts, figures and other forms of evidence and experience. The writing feels complete from start to finish, and doesn’t leave gaping holes in the flow of logic, or make the reader feel like there’s a huge leap needed to land at a clear conclusion. This is what you’re aiming for.
To be honest, not many roles in smaller organisations require this type of writing. Most people in marketing will lean on emotive writing and connections to the heart. Those in operations will lead with facts, figures and outcomes, but may miss communicating the overall purpose of a program.
It’s important to get this mix right.
In the final review process, you may end up with a marketer who’s unhappy about ‘not enough feeling’, and a program manager who’s unhappy about ‘not enough detail’. If you find yourself with this tension between staff about your grant submissions – congratulations, you may have actually hit the sweet spot!
However when push comes to shove and you are dealing with a strict word count, remember that for grant submissions, facts beat flowery language. Don’t sacrifice meaningful program information for ‘marketese’.
For those looking for inspiration, can I suggest having a read of recent newspaper articles relating to your field of work, or recent industry reports that promote new solutions. This will get your ‘eye in’ for the writing style needed, and build your confidence to finalise your grant submissions with beautiful, balanced writing.
