Some Candid Suggestions for Applicants for Research Funding

• Capture the Reviewer's Attention
• Aim for Clarity
• Establish the Context
• What's the Payoff
• Use a Fresh Approach
  Surprises, puzzles, and apparent contradictions can powerfully persuade the reviewer whose disciplinary superego enforces a commitment to systematic model building or formal theorizing: "Given its long-standing democratic traditions, Chile was expected to return to democracy before other countries in the Southern Cone and yet... Is it because these traditions were already extinct by 1973 or because the assumption on which this prediction was based is false?" "Everyone expected that 'One Big Union' - the slogan of the movement - would strike and win wage increases for workers. Yet statistical evidence shows the contrary: strong unions do not strike but instead restrain workers' wage demands."

  It is often worthwhile to help readers understand how the research task grows from the intellectual life of the country or region that generated it. Usually university committees strive to build linkages among an immense diversity of national and international intellectual traditions, and members come from various countries and schools of thought. Many committee members are interested in the interplay of diverse traditions. In fact, the chance to see intellectual history in the making is another reason people accept committee membership. It is a motive to which proposals can legitimately appeal.

  It pays to remember that topics of current salience, both theoretical and in the so-called real world, are likely to be a crowded field. The competitors will be more numerous and the competition less interesting than in truly unfamiliar terrain. Unless you have something truly original to say about them, you may be well advised to avoid topics typically styled "on central interest to the discipline." Usually these are topics about which everyone is writing, and the reason is that somebody else has already made the decisive and exiting contribution. By the time you write your proposal, obtain funding, do the research, and write it up, you might wish you were working on something else. So, if your instinct leads you to a problem far from the course that the pack is running, follow it - not the pack:
  nothing is more valuable than a really fresh beginning.

• Describe Your Methodology
• Specify Your Objectives
• Final Note