Write for the person who has 39 others to read
How do grant reviewers actually read proposals?
Quickly, against a scoring rubric, and in a stack. A federal panel reviewer may carry twenty to forty applications in a cycle and will give most of them well under an hour. They are not looking for the best writing, they are looking for the answer to each scoring criterion, and they are scoring as they go. That changes structure far more than it changes substance: the same argument wins or loses on whether a reviewer can find each piece of it without hunting.
Last reviewed 10 August 2026.
What it changes
- Answer in the reviewer's order, not yours
- If the announcement lists criteria in an order, use that order and use their words as your headings. A reviewer scoring criterion three should not have to work out that you covered it in paragraph nine of a section you called something else.
- Put the answer first in every section
- State the conclusion, then support it. A reviewer who reads only your first sentence per section should still be able to score you, and a surprising number of them effectively do.
- Make the numbers findable
- The figures a reviewer needs to verify a claim should be locatable in seconds. Bury a match percentage in prose and somebody scoring feasibility at eleven at night will mark it unclear rather than go looking.
- Write for someone outside your field
- Panels mix specialists and generalists. Acronyms you use daily are noise to half the room, and a reviewer who cannot follow the mechanism cannot score it highly however good it is.
What it does not change
None of this is an argument for a thinner proposal. Reviewers reward specificity, and the fastest way to lose a panel is to be vague in a way that reads as not having done the work. Skimmability is about where the substance sits, not how much of it there is.
It is also not an argument for writing to a formula. A reviewer on their eleventh proposal of the day notices a real programme described concretely, precisely because most of what they are reading is not that.
Where Quillify comes in
Quillify grades every draft the way a reviewer would, against the criteria in the actual announcement, and runs a three-minute skim test that checks whether each criterion can be found by somebody moving fast. It returns a prioritized list of what is weak rather than a general assessment.
That is a rehearsal of the exact reading your proposal is about to get, and it happens while you can still do something about it.
Who asks this most
The answer above is the same whoever you are. What Quillify does about it is not.
Related
- How a reviewer actually reads your proposalHow do grant reviewers actually read proposals?
- The mistakes that repeatWhat are the most common mistakes in grant proposals?
- How to read a funding announcementHow do I read a NOFO or funding announcement properly?
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