“Not sufficiently…”: the objections EU evaluators raise most often — and how to answer them before you submit

In this post, Pascal Kahlem provides advice based on his experience writing and reviewing European Union grant applications. As Research Whisperer editors, we like his approach. In our experience, his advice holds across all research funding schemes, not just European Union funding. I write European research proposals for a living, and I also evaluate them. Sitting on the assessor’s side changed how I read my own drafts. When you score proposals against a rubric, at speed, alongside a dozen other proposals, you stop looking for brilliance and start looking for reasons to be reassured — and reasons to hesitate. Most of what an evaluator writes in the margins is the second kind. To see how consistent those hesitations are, I read and coded the criticism in 80 real European Union evaluation reports. The single most useful thing I learned is this: evaluators almost never tell you that you are wrong. They tell you that you have not said enough. The words that recur are not “incorrect” or…