Grant Writing Choices
For the grant writing for the Walmart Grant, I worked with Patrick to gather the demographic information of the youths that NICE is serving. We decided that we would format our information in a readable, bullet-point style because there were so many questions and we knew that the audience, the people at NICE who are actually going to submit this grant application, would probably want to clearly see the route by which they should use the information we were providing for them. For the rough draft, we guess-timated the amount of individual youths NICE served, and we guessed at all of student age, gender, and nationality demographics as well. We felt good about it, coming up with percentages, and it turns out that we were absolutely wrong. When we found the information about the amount of students, as we saw when we looked at the audit, hoping to find all of our answers, we saw that our ballpark number was roughly ten times the amount NICE actually served. However, the audit didn’t provide much information beyond that original number. Even when we emailed NICE, and jumped around to a couple different people, we never had our questions answered. So, Patrick and I contributed to the group further by editing and formatting the document and making it a fully cohesive unit. In this, we were keeping our audience in mind. We wanted to make sure that anyone viewing the document for submission purposes would not only see the information clearly, but also see clearly the fact that some categories did not have the information provided for them because they were unavailable.
When we were editing the portions of the document that our peers were entering, we made sure to keep in mind the paramedic method and the ways in which the wording would come across to whoever officials over at Walmart were going to be judging who is a recipient of the grant. We knew that because they were going to be reading so many applications, we would have to get all the points across concisely and clearly and still be not-obviously persuasive. We tweaked some words here and there and changed some sentences to be more active. We also completely removed some small things when they weren’t really helping. And I’ve heard from one of my professors that if a word has been added in that isn’t helping, then it’s doing the opposite and hindering your writing. It’s clogging up whatever it is you are trying to say. A struggle at one point was realizing the huge difference between submissions counting “characters” and not “words.” I had thought, up until then, that they were counting words. So, when editing, I might have lowered the amount of words, but I definitely knocked up the character count. I looked back at the section and saw I had made it almost 200 characters over the limit. Then, we went back and fixed it.
Walmart Grant PDF