Lab drowning in paperwork? Hire an in-house writer Schmidt

I first learnt that I can tell an engaging story when I was ten years old and my teacher gave me positive feedback after hearing my essay about meeting a dog. My ability to craft a good narrative continued to serve me well during my research career, when I needed to write manuscripts, grant proposals and fellowship applications. I realized that, unlike many of my colleagues, I enjoyed these tasks.

But it had never occurred to me that writing could be my job, until one day I took a call from the Switch Laboratory (part of the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research and the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium). I had spent three years there as a researcher, and now they were offering me a position as a technical writer. I stayed for more than four years.

Why hire an in-house grant writer?

The Switch lab’s principal investigators (PIs) are excellent writers, but they recognized that writing caused a bottleneck in their work: completing grant applications and reports, and helping junior colleagues with their manuscripts and fellowship applications, ate up time that they would rather have spent doing science.

They also realized that after the basic ideas for a grant application are established, the proposal can be written up by another dedicated and tenacious person who understands the topic and has an eye for detail. The same goes for the accessory parts of applications (up-to-date CVs, the description of the facilities and so on) and for writing the narrative for a research consortium: once the PIs have agreed on the project, others can do the time-consuming work of collecting input from each lab and turning it into a coherent document.

A postdoc hired as an in-house grant writer can do all these tasks. They can indicate missing details and background. They can be the ‘structural engineer’ of a project, who makes sure that the edifice the ‘architect’ (the PI) envisioned will not collapse when the reviewers try to poke holes in it.

True, an institution’s grant officers or grant writers can help by providing examples of successful applications, advising on how to tweak the project to fit the call or even writing text to put the institution in the best light. But they might not understand the intricacies of the lab’s research — for them, it is just one of the dozen projects they work on. An in-house writer, by contrast, will be invested in taking extra care with every application to ensure the lab’s financial stability and their colleagues’ professional futures.

Moreover, the decision to respond to a call is sometimes made on the spur of the moment. New data might spark an idea, new partners might turn up for a project or you might learn that an application has failed in one call and want to make a last-ditch effort to keep a line of research (and the people working on it) afloat. In my experience, neither grant officers nor institutional grant writers appreciate being told ‘we know that there are only three weeks left before the deadline, but we want to apply, anyway’. But a researcher-turned-writer will understand the urgency.

What makes a good in-house writer?

Think of the in-house grant writer as a speech writer: if the PI explains the vision for a project, the writer needs to be able to create a convincing narrative. Strong interpersonal skills are required because the writer needs to squeeze figures and explanations of data, experimental set-ups and instruments out of busy colleagues without alienating them.

Good organizational skills are paramount. It’s useful to create well-ordered folders and keep track of the evolution of the different parts of the application, because writing grants is an iterative process and sometimes you revert to earlier versions.

The track-changes function is great when you are collecting input from colleagues, but it gets confusing after many iterations. It helps to save clean versions frequently, with the date (and sometimes a, b, c …) in the file name. If the application is submitted through a website, copying web pages into separate text-editor files gives access to editing tools and makes it easier to gather input. Saving the submitted application separately is also important. If it gets funded, you will refer to it at reporting time; if it doesn’t, it can be the basis of another application. Your work on a grant is never wasted.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01823-4

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Béla Z. Schmidt