Grant-Writing Training for an Effective Clinical Research Career

To summarize her experience with the Effective Writing for Health Care program at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Erin Blakeney cites a famous Pablo Picasso quote: "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

Blakeney is a research assistant professor in the Department of Biobehavioral Nursing and Health Informatics at the University of Washington School of Nursing. With a goal of improving outcomes among hospitalized patients, she uses mixed-method approaches to testing and evaluating interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP) interventions for teams of health professionals. As such, her career will increasingly put demands on her writing—and she needed to improve her foundational skills, she says. 

In 2020, when she learned about the HMS program, she'd just submitted for a K23 grant (which gives support and “protected time” for researchers pursuing a clinical research career). She'd received feedback that her proposal needed to be more targeted to the reviewing audience. "It made me realize—my writing needs to be clearer and more concise, to reach the people and institutions I'm asking to support my research. One of the aspects of being a scientist is being able to write effectively so people understand you," says Blakeney. 

So, in November 2020, around the time she resubmitted a second draft for the K23, Blakeney joined the grant writing track of Effective Writing. As a recent graduate of that program (November 2021), she says it's been helpful in all aspects of her professional life—and she has the results to prove it. 

Learning Grant-Writing Foundations 

Blakeney says she'd originally learned how to write piecemeal, developing skills by practicing and emulating others instead of learning grammar, writing, and research as separate subjects. "I was a good enough writer and rarely had people say it wasn't working for them, so because I read a lot and liked writing I could get to a certain proficiency level. But to move forward in getting NIH grants now and in the future, I had to go back and learn the basics," she says. 

The Effective Writing program operates in three phases. Firstly, it gives a foundation of academic argumentation, including the basics of grammar. Blakeney says (with a laugh) that the pre-test was eye-opening for her, specifically how much she thought she knew and didn't. The second phase centers on literature review. Blakeney had published research papers before but says it was helpful to get objective edits from anonymous faculty on the strength of her writing. Finally, the students participate in a capstone project. 

"One of the big takeaways was giving myself time to do iterations and revisions before I send a draft to collaborators," she says. "Since participating in the program, I'm allowing myself more time to work on things before I send them to others—so they can focus on critiquing the ideas, not the writing."

In fact, Blakeney re-wrote and submitted a third draft for her K23 while she was a student in Effective Writing. Luckily, she learned at the end of 2020 that her second draft had been accepted—but, she remembers, re-drafting a stronger proposal with experts around her was helpful. So was the dedicated space to devote herself to improvement. 

"I didn't know how to improve my writing; the program created demands on my time to force me to work on developing my knowledge and skills," she explains.

Research, an R01 Grant, and Developing a Direction

For her capstone, Blakeney focused on the initial development of the ideas for an R01 grant application that will hopefully serve as the cornerstone of her research for years to come. She won't need to submit it until 2023, thanks to the K23. But getting started was incredibly useful. "It's one of those projects where you have to plan and revise. Had I not been working on it for Effective Writing, I wouldn't be anywhere near the point where I am now."

Blakeney's research area is deceptively simple, and not as concrete as R01s can be. At its core, Blakeney is assessing and in some cases implementing clinical routines that involve sharing knowledge between specialties and centering a holistic form of care around the individual. The impacts on outcomes are obvious—bad things can happen when experts don't come together and communicate for the sake of a patient, including errors. But the potential solutions and those positive outcomes are less well-known or studied. 

"How we organize care has a huge impact, but a lot of the structures have just emerged; how are they impacting care and potentially not serving our goals?" she explains. 

Effective Writing helped fill gaps in how to explain these sometimes-nebulous concepts. She credits the faculty for introducing her to helpful resources, particularly Jerusha Achterberg and The Corpus of Contemporary American English, a database of synonyms, analogies, and usage volume for research terms. 

The coursework also helped her clarify and solidify her research direction; sharing ideas with an audience that is different from her usual context, she says, was helpful at the idea level. Blakeney also published a scoping review in 2021, and she says the course helped immensely not just in pursuit of the K23 grant but for, as she puts it, taking the ideas for a spin.

Moving Forward with Better Research and Grant-Writing

Now that Blakeney knows how to improve her writing, she says she feels more confident to bring her ideas to fruition. "Usually, the way we learn is by watching others: trying to reverse engineer, and apply it to our work. There's not a lot of intentional training on how to write, think about writing, and critique our writing, which this program helped me do," she says.

She also learned more about the process of writing, specifically how "you don't need to be in a perfect place to write. Writing and learning weren't meant to be easy. Don't wait for the perfect time; you can still write effectively if you've got competing demands or don't have a ton of time," she says.

Blakeney aspires of writing and communicating for public consumption—particularly as her research area has clear relevance for patients. Part of the Effective Writing program includes writing titles to be clear and interesting to those outside of a particular research area, and she still has access to the coursework from the other Effective Writing tracks (writing for academic journals and writing for the public) that she plans to go back and review to improve her skills further. 

"The program is a great investment in yourself," she says. "It makes the work, and your process, easier and more enjoyable."

Learn more about Effective Writing for Health Care.

Written by Katherine J. Igoe