What is grant proofreading?

Grant proofreading ensures a draft grant proposal conforms to the editorial style, also known as a house or in-house style, of the relevant grant tasking agency or funding body.

What does this service include?

This service includes proofreading your grant proposal to ensure that it conforms to the editorial or house style of the tasking agency or funding body. While not changing the meaning of a text, proofreading corrects inconsistencies in the proposal, improving the document’s look and feel.

What are the key aspects of editorial style?

Editorial style includes:

• spelling
• hyphenation
• capitalisation
• punctuation
• treatment of numbers and numerals
• treatment of quotations
• use of initialisms
• acronyms and other abbreviations
• use of italics and bold type
• format of footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies and other documentation
• Treatment of special elements. These can include headings, lists, tables, and images. Images fall into two main categories: figures (including photographs, illustrations, drawings, diagrams, logos, graphs, and maps) and tables.

Why is editorial style important?

Editorial style is essential for grant funding bodies, as it is for book publishers. At book publishing firms, as well as publishers of scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines, a house style is used to ensure all authors, copyeditors and proofreaders use the same style manual (e.g. The Chicago Manual of Style or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, known as the APA Manual).

This is to ensure consistency in multi-author publications (e.g., magazines, scholarly journals, reports, collaborative books, edited collections) within a series and across similar publications from the same publishing house.

For reports and grant applications in particular, house style may also be mandated to ensure consistency with corporate branding.

Is there anything else included in this service?

We will confirm which style manual or editorial style the grant funding body prefers. In addition, our grant proposal proofreading service checks whether a preferred in-house dictionary is available. We will also request an in-house style guide tipsheet, if available, or a checklist of editorial preferences.

Our grant proposal proofreading service will also consider earlier grant proposals or comparable texts for comparison.

Who is this service for?

This service is ideal for:

• academics preparing research grant applications
• consultants or peak industry bodies applying for government funding
• not-for-profits, NGOs, and think tanks applying for government or industry funding
• University centres preparing small or large grant applications
• research teams working on large, multi-author research funding applications.

If you would like to know more about how Wise Directions Copyediting can benefit you, please contact us today.