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An Approach (and Template) for Reproducible Proposal Writing

This past year came with a significant increase in the number and complexity of funding proposals I put together. The process has been a bit of a learning experience, particularly in how important organization can be to larger writing projects. While I think the standard approach is to fight with Word, I’ve taken the opportunity to try and adopt some software tools (including Latex and Git) to make the process a bit more reproducible and straightforward. A few lessons I’ve taken away from the year follow below; if you would like to replicate the workflow I apply, please take a look at the template I start from on Github.

Obviously, these tips won’t make you have high-quality science to talk about, but have helped me streamline the process of getting that material onto a page without errors.

  1. I also find track changes very distracting, so versioning being handled in a separate tool is helpful.