18.For resubmissions, be sure that you are very responsive to the reviewers’ critiques. Be meticulous and direct when you are responsive to comments, not side-stepping issues. In response to a reviewer’s comments, the mentor must be fully engaged, read the revised application, and offer suggestions. Your mentor is the ideal person to ask, for example, if any of the reviewers’ comments should prompt the creation of a new Specific Aim. Although the overall tone of the resubmission responses to the reviewers’ critiques should be nonconfrontational, if you and your mentor are in total disagreement with a particular comment, it is completely appropriate to defend your original text.

19.Again, to ensure that the reviewer’s job is simplified, revised sections should either be highlighted in yellow or denoted by a vertical line adjacent to the revised portions of the grant proposal for ease of recognition by reviewers. If you have time, even in your introduction comments about your resubmitted proposal, denote even the page number of the revisions. This is especially useful to a reviewer who has thoroughly read your grant previously and may want to see now how specifically you have changed the application.

Final Finishing Points About the Research Plan

20.Remember to italicize and embolden important points or phrases for those reviewers who lack time to be detailed in their review. Remember Niederhuber’s comments about making the reviewer’s job easier.

21.Limit the use of acronyms – they are convenient only for you since they save the writer space but make the proposal harder to read for the reviewer, violating Niederhuber.

22.Remember that the appendix has no space restriction. Use it to your advantage with details such as outlines of anticipated courses of study, validated questionnaires for your research studies etc. The reviewers (since they are grant writers too) do understand that with the new