This post is cross-posted at my dissertation site.

I spent the day researching grants and reading about how to properly put together a proposal. I also spent a bit of time plotting out my todo list for this semester, creating a checklist of tasks and when they are due. I made the list in my Google Calendar, so it’s not available to be embedded on this site. I’ll have to work on finding a replacement or something.

One of the places I’ll be applying to for a research grant is the Social Science Research Council (http://www.ssrc.org). They happen to have a short paper on how to best write a proposal for their competitions, and being no dummy, I know I can apply these tips to all the proposals I write. So here are some tips from their paper, “On the Art of Writing Proposals.”

Purpose of Proposals is to Persuade

The main thing to realize when writing a proposal, is that you are trying to persuade the approval committee that your project is better than all the others. The trick is to do it in as short a space as possible—in the first paragraph, or at least the first page—while including all of the points the readers are looking for. In the end you want the readers to associate you with your project (Billy’s the guy researching blind Algerian water cave fish with telepathic properties), rather than other mundane tidbits (Jane is the gal from New York City, right?). It truly is an art.

What do they want?!

All scholarly projects require three basic merits: “conceptual innovation, methodological rigor, and rich, substantive content.” Additionally, the readers are going to be asking three questions that the proposal needs to answer:

• What are we going to learn?
• Why do we need to know?
• How do you prove it?

And this all needs to be done initially very clearly, succinctly, and as forcefully as possible in the shortest amount of text.

Let me be clear about this…

It’s important to keep in mind that the individuals in the approval committee come from varying disciplines. Therefore, the proposal needs to be clear, free of the jargon typical of your discipline, all the while explaining the boundary pushing or unique way your project approaches your field. Keep the focus of the proposal on the ideas and leave the technical aspects to an appendix. Make the first page explain as clearly as possible what the topic is about, and what the readers—essentially, what the granting committee—is going to learn from this.

So What!

This is the crux of the whole matter. Why in the world does anybody need to know about this? What’s the point? Who cares? Why?! This is sometimes the hardest part to figure out. I know it is for me. I continually mull this point over. Do I really have a convincing and compelling reason. It seems for the time being, for me, that my biggest compelling reason, my “so what?” is because it hasn’t been researched before. While that may be a valid reason, be careful. Others may conclude that there is adequate justification for there to be no scholarship in the first place. There are other aspects that make a research topic important and valid. “Turning points, crucial breakthroughs, central personages, fundamental institutions, and similar appeals to significance of of the object of research are sometimes effective, if argued rather than merely asserted.

Apply the topic to current political, economic or social debates. How is your research not only timely but currently urgent, such that it provides a new way to view current issues, or turn the direction of current understanding?

Also try to be fresh and appealing in your approach. Promote the apparent contradictions, extrapolate on puzzles, and catch the readers off guard with surprises. Take the less traveled path. If current trends lean towards one area of research, but your topic can gyrate towards a new and fresh approach, take it!

Oh Yeah? Prove it!

It is important for the proposal committee to know the methodology of your approach. Do not just tell them what you will discover, but how you intend to discover it. What types of sources, what means of debate, what technology will be employed? But don’t just list out your tasks and how you’ll do them, argue why this is the best course of action to achieve the results you intend to acquire. Because some readers may be from interdisciplinary fields, take the time to explain “what parts of your methodology are standard, and which are innovative.” Some ideas to cover:

• Activities you plan to undertake to collect information
• Techniques you will use to analyze the data
• Tests of validity you will apply
• Specify the archives, sources, and respondents

Finally, proposals should describe the end product. Will the grant help to complete a dissertation chapter, a book, a digital project? Be specific as to what the proposed outcome of this supported project will be.

End with the Beginning in mind…

And begin with the ending in mind, of course. It takes a long time to write a decent proposal. Start early. Give yourself several weeks, or months if possible. Write a first draft and set it aside for a day. Then revise and set aside again. Ask others to take a look at it. Revise it again. Make sure your opening paragraph is succinct, to the point, and effective.

The closing of your proposal should reference the beginning. If you mentioned a story or a specific and compelling reason for the research, reference it again. The effect is to try and tie it all up in a neat little package.

Now, get back to work!

Well, that all sounds really good. Now if I can just apply it to my proposals!

To make this post not so boring, here’s a couple of pictures I put in my paper.

After meeting with my dissertation and adviser and prof., we decided to make the paper more focused and helpful for the dissertation. So the plan is now to have this become an introductory chapter. I have done plenty of reading on Albert Speer, and digging through some archival documents, and that will still be helpful and apply to this paper, but the focus will be different.

I definitely need more books, but the ones listed in the last post are a good start.

Oh, man. A lot has transpired since I wrote the above, three weeks ago. The title still applies, and even more so. I turned in my first draft with good reviews from the class, but significant changes required from my dissertation advisor. So much to write about, so many tips and tricks I’ve picked up.

Tips for writing a paper that I should have known already

1. So, first of all meet with your professors often. This is essential to stay on target. Meet at every step: beginning and deciding on the topic; bibliography; outline; first draft; second draft; final draft.
2. Make an outline! Man, why did I not do this more often in the past? This was a life saver in helping me formulate thoughts, figure out what was important and what was just an interesting tangent. One of the best benefits of an outline, I found, was that it made the reading more focused. Granted, it took a book or two to figure out what was important about the topic, but making the outline made reading the books easy. I didn’t have to plod through each book, cover to cover. Instead I sought out the parts of the book that helped fill in the outline. Awesome!
3. Peer review. This was a required part of the course. We all got to read another classmate’s paper and critique/review it. It was neat to see how the reviewer always had some neat aspect or idea that really helped flesh out the topic even more. (I’ll blog about the awesome and pivotal ideas that Mark gave about my paper.)

So there are three good tips. Now I have some more-than-minor rewrites and additional research to do for the version of the paper for class, and some major rewriting and researching to do for the version for my dissertation advisor.

Not that I really have time to blog as I do it, but… I feel like I need to do something historical here… So why not.

Tunnel at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (German: Markirch), in Alsace, France

So this is my last class before embarking on my dissertation. The Graduate Research Seminar should hopefully tie up any loose knots in our historical writing abilities. It’s a course on honing our skills. The syllabus looks great, and I’m excited for the class. One initial question I had was, why are we learning how to write like historians until the very end? Why don’t we learn how to write at the beginning or even in the middle? Well, there is a course or two on that, but nothing like this one proposes to be. We’re apparently going to learn all the behind-the-scene techniques and tricks to the trade. I’m actually really excited for it. Our Professor is great.

So for this class we’re supposed to write a 25-30 page paper that will hopefully become a chapter (or at least a bulk of one) of the dissertation. If nothing else, it can be a publishable paper. On the very low end, it will at least teach us something we don’t want to do for a dissertation.

Map of tunnel locations

My dissertation, as it stands now, is on Nazi Tunnels. The Nazis, towards the middle of the war, decided that they needed to move much of their war manufacturing underground. So they designed and built huge underground bunkers and tunnel systems for factories and depots. Go ahead, google it. There’s not much out there. Add the keywords, ‘melk ebensee’ and you’ll get a few more responses. The only scholarly works that I know of on this topic are two German books. One is an excellent work by Hans Walter Wichert, Decknamenverzeichnis deutscher unterirdischer Bauten(at Amazon, already have one), which lists practically all of the underground building sites during Nazi Germany. The second work is a dissertation by Bertrand Perz, Projekt Quarz: Steyr-Daimler-Puch Und Das Konzentrationslager Melk, Industrie, Zwangsarbeit und Konzentrationslager in O?sterreich (at Amazon if anyone wants to buy it for me), which is an in-depth look at one of these underground projects in Melk, Australia.

Anyhow, there are totally no sources available, to my knowledge, that I can use for the current project. That’s part of my dissertation work, is to dig up all of those sources. It should be fun. It’s also not manageable in a semester’s time. So for this semester’s project I had several ideas.

Projekt Quarz

First, I thought about doing a micro-study on just one of the tunnels. Unfortunately, in the two or three hours of looking for sources, I couldn’t find any. I haven’t checked with the library, yet, but I’m not hopeful. So my second idea is to look at a more broad topic that touches the issue of the tunnels. One obvious one is, why did they build them in the first place (the answer is to protect them from Allied bombings). But a deeper question begs, why did they think they could do that in the first place. It was a huge undertaking to move so many factories underground. They must have though they could do it. So a deeper question would be, why did the Nazi’s think they could undertake such a big job. Now let’s step back a bit, say, 30-50 years, and apply this question to Germany as a whole in the form of, what did German’s think of their technical and scientific abilities? So that will be my basis of inquiry for this semester’s project. I will look at what German citizens, German scientists, and German politicians thought about German science and technology from 1900 until the end of World War II. I post more on this as I think it through and find sources.

So, basically, I’m hoping to keep up the blog as I write the paper and take the class. I’ll post the methodology that I learn, and the troubles and trials, the triumphs and tackles about writing a historical paper.

First off, I feel completely unprepared because I have no sources. That’s the first thing to tackle.