Maybe You're Born With It?

The Meandering Scholar wonders whether grantsmanship is a task that can be mastered or an intrinsic talent. To that end, he asks his readers whether PIs should teach their trainees how to write grants or if doing so would be "wasting their valuable lab time" and "enforcing skills they might not appreciate." Should every postdoc be required to try their hand at writing and submitting a funding proposal "or is good grantsmanship contingent upon a more ingrained skill set than the ability to form a perfect sentence?" he asks. ChemicalBiLOLogy says that grant-writing is all "skill, skill, skill, [such] that even if you are not naturally gifted at, you can use strategies to improve to the point where you get competitive." BrooksPhD points out that even those who are considered gifted writers can struggle to adapt to the "different styles required for writing a manuscript vs. a grant application in addition to different styles for different grants/agencies."