Writing a successful grant proposal is not a matter of luck; it is a skill to be learned and honed. This is true not just for scholars who apply for funding but also for academic editors who want to support them in this endeavour. If you are lucky, you will have a mentor that guides you in this learning process – a senior scholar with multiple successful grants under their belt if you are the former, an editor who already has experience in grant editing if you are the latter. If not, there are also some resources out there to help.
One of these resources is Dr. Betty Lai’s The Grant Writing Guide (published by Princeton University Press in 2023), which I recently had the opportunity to review for The Editors’ Weekly, Editors/ Réviseurs Canada’s blog. Lai – a professor in Counselling Psychology at Boston College – wrote The Grant Writing Guide as a “road map” to guide “scholars from all disciplines” and at any stages of their career. Her goal is to provide you with the fundamentals so no matter which grant you apply for, you will be able to submit a proposal that will appeal to funders and that will – fingers crossed! – win you the grant.
Because of the blog’s specific readership (editors!), most of my reflections are on how academic editors (including those not based in the US, like myself) who are thinking about adding grant writing support as one of their services might benefit from having this book in their professional library. Still, if you are curious, you can read my review:
Betty Lai’s The Grant Writing Guide: Reviewed for Editors/Réviseurs Canadas
Want to check out another self-help resource? I also reviewed Laura Portwood-Stacer’s Make Your Manuscript Work (Princeton University Press, 2025). This one’s for academics that want to work on the big picture elements (argument, evidence, structure, style) of their writing.