Guidelines

Ten ways to get your proposal turned down

1. Don’t follow the directions or guidelines given for your kind of proposal. Omit information that is asked for. Ignore word limits.
2. Ensure the title has little relationship to the stated objectives; and that neither title nor objectives link to the proposed methods or techniques.
3. Produce woolly, ill-defined objectives.
4. Have the statement of the central problem or research focus vague, or obscure it by other discussion.
5. Leave the design and methodology implicit; let them guess.
6. Have some mundane task, routine consultancy or poorly conceptualized data trawl masquerade as a research project.
7. Be unrealistic in what can be achieved with the time and resources you have available.
8. Be either very brief, or preferably, long-winded and repetitive in your proposal. Rely on weight rather than quality.
9. Make it clear what the findings of your research are going to be, and demonstrate how your ideological stance makes this inevitable.
10. Don’t worry about a theoretical or conceptual framework for your research. You want to do a down-toearth study so you can forget all that fancy stuff.

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