Assume Nothing

You should heed page limitations and style requirements. Staff handling applications have to deal with thousands of pages and rightly so will be irritated by an obvious lack of attention to details.

For instance, reducing font size to fit more pages into the space limitation is a very bad idea. Remember that reviewers are investigators like you with classes to teach, thesis to read, paper to write, etc. The faster they understand what you are trying to do, the better you are.

It is not unusual for one reviewer to have to read 10 applications for a given meeting. The easier you make the job for that person to:

• Understand you are talking about,

• See in the text and figures what you your aims propose,

• Not having to dig for obscure terms and abbreviations, the better you will be.

Even though reviewers are experts in each field, they are human and cannot possible what other scientist do, publish, or present at meetings. If the technique you are using for your experiments is not how to make a saline solution, you should explain what it is and what it does. Even if the protocol is your invention you need to provide citations unless is 100% original.

Moreover, you need to ALWAYS explain the alternatives you considered in case that the proven method does not work. Everyone who worked in the laboratory knows that nothing works flawless and that many times protocols cannot be duplicated without tweaking them. For instance, a histochemical reaction to decorate a secretory product may not work if de-ionized water instead of purified water is used, even though that is what the protocol indicates.

Avoid sloppy justifications for well known/characterized protocols. For instance, if you request $5,000 for preparing 10 Hematoxylin-Eosin stained slides from a fixed liver block, someone in a review group will probably know that it does not cost that much to produce the slides.

With today digital information flood is very easy to produce lots of data. The question you need to ask is what portion of the data proves your argument. Most reviewers care less about how hard you worked, and thus, you should not overwhelm them with too much stuff.