Writing Effective Grant Rejoinders

If you are in the business of applying for #grants or #fellowships, you are in most cases in the business of writing #rejoinders!

The rejoinder is a critical stage in many grant applications where you get the chance to increase the proposal’s prospects, potentially getting it across the line to acceptance and award. For what is often just a few hundred carefully chosen words, you can make a very big difference to your chance of success!

In this #HackingAcademia video, I outline the key considerations and concepts that can help you make your grant rejoinders as effective as possible. In particularly I cover the key characteristics and rules of the rejoinder process that affect how you can go about the rejoinder, the process of reading and digesting the reviews themselves, and the key concepts that shape how you go about writing the rejoinder itself, including “less is more”.

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🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Introduction to Rejoinders
📌 (0:09) The Rejoinder as Part of the Grant Process
📌 (0:25) Maximizing the Effectiveness of Your Rejoinder
📌 (0:34) What The Rejoinder Can and Can’t Do
📌 (1:16) Understanding The Grant-Specific Rejoinder Rules
📌 (1:24) Do Reviewers See Your Rejoinder?
📌 (1:44) Typical Constraints: Only Factual Correction
📌 (1:58) Typical Constraints: No New Content
📌 (2:11) Rules Can Both Be Absolute and Subjective
📌 (2:33) Understanding The Amount of Signal in Reviews
📌 (3:00) Example: High Scoring, Highly Critical Reviewers
📌 (3:11) Calibrating Risk Appetite in High Signal Situations
📌 (3:26) Negative versus Positive Reviews
📌 (3:55) Read Reviews Multiple Times and Sleep On It!
📌 (4:14) Categorized Highlighting of Reviews
📌 (4:29) Get Multiple Opinions
📌 (4:39) Drafting the Rejoinder: Key Concepts
📌 (4:52) Key Concept: Less is More
📌 (5:13) Key Concept: Words That Do Double Duty
📌 (5:37) An Attitude of Calm Assurance and Confidence
📌 (6:02) Choosing Your Battles
📌 (6:31) Group Reviewer Comments in Themes
📌 (7:02) Panels May Partially or Fully Disregard Comments
📌 (7:27) Keep Responses to Crazy Comments Short
📌 (7:42) Formatting and Spacing is Your Friend
📌 (8:10) Be Deliberate In Where You Spend Your Words
📌 (8:35) Where Possible Reference Existing Content
📌 (9:01) Rejoinders are for Crisp Responses Not Debates
📌 (9:27) Dealing with Inappropriate Reviewer Comments
📌 (10:07) Rejoinder Excellence is a Worthy Skill to Develop
📌 (10:34) Rejoinder Writing Helps With Other Skills