Fellowship Applications Editing and Proofreading Services

Fourteen people sit on the panel. Two of them work in the applicant's subfield and understood the case immediately. The other twelve are a historian, an engineer, a clinician, two lay members and seven academics from unrelated disciplines, and they are all scoring. The proposal is excellent. The lay summary is four sentences of jargon with the technical abstract's first paragraph pasted into it.

We edit fellowship applications and their supporting material — lay and non-specialist summaries, case for support and research plans, career development and training sections, host and mentor statements, justification of resources, ethics and data management sections, and the covering material for early career and mid-career schemes. Our editors work on applications read by panels who are not all specialists.

The lay summary is the section most panels read first and most applicants write last, and its failure is a technical abstract with the longest words removed. A non-specialist member who cannot follow the summary scores the whole application on the parts they can follow. We work through these so the summary opens with the problem rather than the method, since a panel member from another field can judge whether a problem matters and cannot judge a technique; so the first sentence contains no term that needs a definition, because one unexplained word costs the reader the rest of the paragraph and they will not ask; so what is currently not possible is stated plainly, given that the gap is what makes the work necessary and specialists routinely leave it implicit; so any necessary technical term is introduced with a working comparison rather than a definition, as a comparison lets a reader keep going and a definition asks them to memorise; so the expected outcome is described as what somebody would be able to do afterwards, since panels are deciding between fields and need to compare consequences; so the timescale to any real-world benefit is stated honestly, because a summary implying next year when the answer is fifteen years is remembered when the panel discusses trust; so the summary works read aloud in ninety seconds; and so it is written before the case for support rather than after, since a summary that cannot be written usually indicates a case that has not been settled. Summaries written this way carry the twelve non-specialists.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished research, applications and referee material. We are editors rather than researchers, panel members or funders, and we offer no view on the science, the case or any funding decision. What we can do is make the summary work for the reader who is not in your field.