Science Grant Writing Tip: Delete those -ly ending adverbs!

Writing a compelling sentence that gets across your point as quickly as possible in the minimum number of characters is one of the great difficulties faced when writing a grant application (or peer-reviewed journal article) in science. One of the quickest ways to improve your writing is to remove unnecessary words. A common culprit is adverbs that end in -ly, especially when used in the middle of a sentence, just like I just did.

By deleting -ly ending words, you can: 

1. Simplify the sentence

2. Reduce word count (great for grants)

3. Increase the confidence and impact of the statement

If you want to further improve the impact of a statement or sentence, you can go one step further and replay the offending -ly word with a number or fact. This will provide the critical ‘evidence’ that is needed by the reader to make your statement believable and tangible. This takes your statement from a generic sentence that is discardable and turns it into a powerful weapon that elevates your arguments.

Common words (adverbs) ending in -ly that can be deleted (not exhaustive)	Deleting -ly word Examples.	Replacing -ly words with numbers/facts to enhance impact
commonly directly especially full greatly highly invariably likely mostly possibly potentially predominantly preferably previously recently regularly roughly strongly totally typically traditionally	– The BRCA1/2 genes are commonly mutated in breast cancer.  – Tumour growth was totally inhibited by the drug treatment.  – I mostly work in chemistry and biochemistry.  – These breakthroughs could potentially lead to novel immunotherapies. – We previously showed that chemotherapy strongly inhibited cell proliferation (ref).  – We will regularly meet with our consumer panel to discuss and co-design the project.	– The BRCA1/2 genes are mutated in ~10% of breast cancer.  – the drug treatment inhibited 99.5% of tumour growth. – 65% of my work is in chemistry and biochemistry.  – We showed that chemotherapy inhibited cell proliferation by 74% (ref).  – We will meet every 3 months with our consumer panel to discuss and co-design the project.