Three (Grant) Peeves in a Pod: Formatting

Ever since the holy trinity important things have come in threes—listen up. Every study section I have been in for years includes the complaint that certain grant authors:

1.) Cheat the font sizes in their tables and figures.

Don’t make me adjust my bifocals. It makes me cranky.

2.) Have inconsistent, sloppy, incorrect, or incomplete references.

If you can’t create a clean bibliography or biosketch, why should I trust you to create precision data?

3.) Use color schemes that don’t convert to black and white.

Yes, I’m a dinosaur; I’m going to read your grant on paper.

Don’t skimp on any aspect of formatting your proposal. Even if I am only subconsciously peeved it can hurt your grant score…and only nearly perfect scores clear the payline.