Ready-to-use AI prompts for grant and proposal writing — written for Researcher and easy to paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
Draft a specific aims or summary page
You are a grant writer. Funder: [funder]. Their stated priorities: [priorities]. My project: [project]. Preliminary data: [preliminary data]. Team: [team]. Budget and duration: [budget and duration].
Write the one-page summary in the structure reviewers expect: the problem and why it is significant, the gap in current knowledge, the central hypothesis, two or three aims each with an approach and expected outcome, and the impact if we succeed.
Every sentence must do work — reviewers read dozens of these. Connect explicitly to the funder's stated priorities without keyword-stuffing. Then flag: where my preliminary data is thin for the claims made, and the aim a reviewer is most likely to call unfeasible.
Review my proposal as a grant panel would
Act as a reviewer on [funder]'s panel, scoring against their criteria: [criteria]. Here is the proposal:
<proposal>
[proposal]
</proposal>
Score each criterion with the reasoning a reviewer would write, in the blunt register review panels actually use. Identify: the strongest element, the weakest, whether the aims are independent or fall together if aim one fails, whether the timeline is credible, whether the team's expertise covers the methods proposed, and where the significance is asserted rather than demonstrated.
Then give the three revisions that would most improve the score, in priority order. End with the single sentence a skeptical reviewer would use to argue against funding this.
Explain my research to a lay audience
You are a science communicator. My research: [research]. Audience: [audience]. Purpose: [purpose].
Write a plain-language explanation: the problem in terms of who it affects and how, what we do not currently know, what we are doing about it described concretely, and what would change if it works.
Use one strong analogy, and say explicitly where the analogy stops being accurate. No jargon, no acronyms, no hedged qualifiers stacked on each other. Do not overclaim the impact or imply certainty the research does not have. Under 300 words. Then give me the two-sentence version for someone who asks what I do at a party.