🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

If you are in the business of applying for #grants or #fellowships, you are in most cases in the business of writing #rejoinders!

The rejoinder is a critical stage in many grant applications where you get the chance to increase the proposal’s prospects, potentially getting it across the line to acceptance and award. For what is often just a few hundred carefully chosen words, you can make a very big difference to your chance of success!

In this #HackingAcademia video, I outline the key considerations and concepts that can help you make your grant rejoinders as effective as possible. In particularly I cover the key characteristics and rules of the rejoinder process that affect how you can go about the rejoinder, the process of reading and digesting the reviews themselves, and the key concepts that shape how you go about writing the rejoinder itself, including “less is more”.

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🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Introduction to Rejoinders
📌 (0:09) The Rejoinder as Part of the Grant Process
📌 (0:25) Maximizing the Effectiveness of Your Rejoinder
📌 (0:34) What The Rejoinder Can and Can’t Do
📌 (1:16) Understanding The Grant-Specific Rejoinder Rules
📌 (1:24) Do Reviewers See Your Rejoinder?
📌 (1:44) Typical Constraints: Only Factual Correction
📌 (1:58) Typical Constraints: No New Content
📌 (2:11) Rules Can Both Be Absolute and Subjective
📌 (2:33) Understanding The Amount of Signal in Reviews
📌 (3:00) Example: High Scoring, Highly Critical Reviewers
📌 (3:11) Calibrating Risk Appetite in High Signal Situations
📌 (3:26) Negative versus Positive Reviews
📌 (3:55) Read Reviews Multiple Times and Sleep On It!
📌 (4:14) Categorized Highlighting of Reviews
📌 (4:29) Get Multiple Opinions
📌 (4:39) Drafting the Rejoinder: Key Concepts
📌 (4:52) Key Concept: Less is More
📌 (5:13) Key Concept: Words That Do Double Duty
📌 (5:37) An Attitude of Calm Assurance and Confidence
📌 (6:02) Choosing Your Battles
📌 (6:31) Group Reviewer Comments in Themes
📌 (7:02) Panels May Partially or Fully Disregard Comments
📌 (7:27) Keep Responses to Crazy Comments Short
📌 (7:42) Formatting and Spacing is Your Friend
📌 (8:10) Be Deliberate In Where You Spend Your Words
📌 (8:35) Where Possible Reference Existing Content
📌 (9:01) Rejoinders are for Crisp Responses Not Debates
📌 (9:27) Dealing with Inappropriate Reviewer Comments
📌 (10:07) Rejoinder Excellence is a Worthy Skill to Develop
📌 (10:34) Rejoinder Writing Helps With Other Skills

Full Video Notes

• If you are a researcher, especially in academia, it’s likely that you’ll spend a lot of time writing grant proposals in order to get funding for what you want to do. While grant processes can vary substantially, they often follow a common structure: the initial application, reviews and feedback, the opportunity to write a rejoinder or response to those reviews, and then a final decision. This video is specifically about the rejoinder process, how to maximize the effectiveness of your rejoinder, and hopefully get your grant over the line!
• First things first: the rejoinder is just a part of the application process, and even if you do an amazing job of it, it likely can’t save a very lowly rated initial application. Likewise, writing a mediocre rejoinder may not sink your proposal if it was initially ranked extremely highly – but that’s a risk I’d suggest you not deliberately take, if at all possible! But between these extremes there will be opportunities where your initial proposal is either “in the running” or “potentially” in the running to be funded: in these situations, the quality of your rejoinder can play a critical role in getting you over the finish line.
• It’s important to understand the specific processes surrounding the rejoinder for the particular grant or funding scheme you’ve applied for. Some of the key considerations are: do the reviewers who wrote the initial assessment of your grant see your rejoinder, or does your rejoinder go to a different body, like an overarching selection panel or committee? These considerations will play a key role in shaping how you go about writing a good rejoinder.
• Often the rejoinder process will have specific rules on what you can and can’t do. Sometimes you will be restricted to only correcting outright factual errors or misconceptions of the reviewers, but not much more. The process may also specify that you can’t introduce any new information at the rejoinder stage: instead relying only on references to what has already been written in your initial proposal. The key concept to remember here is risk appetite and rule flexibility. Whilst you don’t want to blatantly violate the rules and potentially get a ban from future applications or at the least annoy your assessors, in many application schemes the application of these rules is always to some extent subjective, and so you may choose to bend them, just a little.
• I’ll talk now about going through the reviews themselves. First up, the signal contained in the reviews for a grant can vary hugely. For some grant schemes, there is very little apparent correlation between the positivity or negativity of the reviews, and the final outcome for the grant. Often this is the case for schemes where reviewers give comments, but also score the grant in a manner that is invisible to the proposer. A common phenomenon is for the grant to be very highly scored, and, having given those very high scores, for a reviewer to be quite critical in their commentary. 
• When there is good signal in the reviews – that is, there is a strong link between the review tone and the likely final outcome for the grant – you can use tone of the reviews to calibrate your risk appetite when writing the rejoinder. A basic principle here would be, if the reviewers are extremely positive, to err on the side of a relatively conservative rejoinder – no need to make super strong statements. Likewise, if the reviewers are pretty negative, you can consider taking a few more risks with the rejoinder, pushing back more strongly, perhaps making some slightly controversial assertions where you strongly believe that they support your case.
• Before you start writing, you need to have gone through the reviews in details, multiple times. You also should have slept on it – this gives you some time to suppress those initial instinctive reactions when emotions are running high, and come back to them with a more measured, objective take.
• In going through the reviews, you may employ some sort of highlighting scheme where you specify the specific issues brought up by the various reviewers: positive and negative comments, comments about not enough detail being provided, and other categories. It’s also important where possible to get a second, and ideally third or more opinion on the reviews, especially from someone with experience in the particular funding scheme.
• Once you’re familiar with the reviewers, you can move on to drafting the rejoinder. To do this well, there are some key, big picture concepts that are important to understand up front.
• The first concept is the well known saying, “less is more”. Do not feel compelled to use every last word in the allowable word count for the rejoinder, and aim to be well under the rejoinder limit. Doing so will force you to prioritise your responses, and really think about what you want to respond to in detail.
• Another key concept is that of doing “double duty”. Wherever possible in the rejoinder text, your words should be serving at least two beneficial purposes. The most obvious is of course responding to the reviewer comments. But in doing so, you can also implicitly or subtly restate the case for the proposal that you made in the initial proposal.
• Finally, there is the state of mind you are in when you write the rejoinder. I always recommend an attitude of calm, quiet assurance and confidence, without straying into being overconfident. An attitude of, “it’s great to get this constructive feedback, I’m confident I can very satisfactorily address the comments and demonstrate compellingly that none of the issues raised are significant”.
• The reviewers will have typically raised a long list of concerns or potential issues with the proposal. Unless the proposal rules specifically say that you have to address every minor comment, you should be very deliberate and intentional in what you choose to respond to and to what level of detail. This is especially the case for grant review processes where your rejoinder does not go back to the reviewers themselves, but rather to a separate panel or committee of experts.
• Rather than doing a blow by blow response to each individual reviewer comment, you can also choose to group the comments by common theme, and answer in one block to a bunch of comments covering a similar issue. This is good for the narrative flow of the rejoinder, and saves on word count and unnecessary repetition. It also gives you a little bit more control over the story of the reviews – although you must be very careful not to misrepresent the reviewers’ comments.
• If your rejoinder isn’t read by the reviewers but is rather read by a separate panel, one thing to keep in mind is that the panel may have their own formal or informal processes for disregarding some of the comments. They may apply different weightings to the different reviewers, so that not all comments are treated equally. They may choose to disregard completely the comments from a particular reviewer. A particularly controversial comment that any reasonable reader might disregard, may not be worth devoting half of your rejoinder to, because the panel may also think the same thing: succinctly address it and move on!
• You can also make it easier for your readers by basic formatting and spacing. Keep your sentences relatively short and concise. Avoid extremely long paragraphs. Use headings where possible and allowed. Even in text only forms, often encountered in online grant management systems, you can use line spacing and capitalisation, of course sparingly, to make your rejoinders easier to read.
• The people reading your rejoinder will be, to some extent, be influenced by what you focus on. While you don’t want to fail to address major issues the reviewers have raised, you can choose the balance of how much text you spend addressing each issue. You may choose to really focus on one key issue because you think it’s both the most important one to address, but also the one where your response will be strongest.
• When presenting information to correct or counter a reviewer’s assertion, it’s always more powerful to refer to information that is already in the initial proposal, rather than to introduce new material or information – and often that isn’t strictly allowed anyway. Reference page numbers or sections that give a clear piece of information that already addresses the reviewer’s comment.
• In your response, focus on the most blatant issues, that have the least subjectivity or fuzzyness. A rejoinder is not the place to get into protracted philosophical debates. Correct clear misconceptions or factual errors from the reviewers. Calmly and concisely correct misconceptions around one of the investigator’s track records or suitability to be on the proposal.
• You should never attack the reviewers, and never be snarky about them. However, you will on occasion get a reviewer who has clearly gone beyond professional criticism into the territory of personal attacks and inappropriate comments. You should first consult both the rules and people experienced about the scheme on the appropriate process for dealing with this. Sometimes you can put in a request to exclude a reviewer on this basis. Otherwise, you may need to address their comments. Again, calm confidence is needed in doing so – present concise, non-emotive statements that clearly refute or correct their assertions.
• Becoming an effective rejoinder writer is a key skill that can substantially improve your success rate with each grant you submit. An experienced rejoinder writer will be able to glance at any set of grant reviews and almost instantaneously come up with a strategy for how to effectively respond to them. In terms of a return on investment, it’s also one of the best bang for buck components of the entire grant writing process. Learning to write rejoinders well will also help with your skills in pitching, refining a research narrative, and your general competency in discussing research at a high-level.