Interviewer: Great. And um, how long has it been since you graduated from college?
Grantwriter: My undergraduate degree was 1968.
Interviewer: Great. Okay. Um, and [00:00:30] how long did you work in the community college world?
Grantwriter: Oh, about a total of between part-time and full time, 25, 26 years or something like that. I don’t know exactly, but around there. More than 20 years.
Interviewer: Wow. Okay, wonderful. Um, and could you provide us with a brief description of your primary job functions in that department chair position?
Grantwriter: As a department chair, my primary [00:01:00] function was to write grants for government funded programs, state and local government, and then go before a panel of workforce development people to present the reason that they should give us this grant. The grant was–the grants were all for job training and work readiness for unemployed or low-income people or people returning to the workplace. And then when we received the grant, which [00:01:30] I received–[there was ] maybe only one I didn’t get over the 10 years I was a department chair. Um, when we got the grant then my job was to make sure we had the staff, make sure the curriculum goes–there really weren’t many books that would address these specific jobs. Um, hire subject matter experts and make sure that they knew how to teach, manage the budget, um, get the students jobs [00:02:00] after they graduated, and then report back to the, the workforce development board.
Interviewer: Excellent. In a given week, what percentage of your job required writing?
Grantwriter: I would not say that there was any percentage in a given week. The writing when, when it was done was intense. So it might–I might not write anything for weeks at a time. And then for example, [00:02:30] Department of Labor grants would all be due in January. So I had six grants, um, that I would have to have written by January in order to submit. So October through December, uh, the main part of my job would be writing the grants. So it would depend, it depended whenever, um, whenever an opportunity for [00:03:00] a grant arose, that’s, that was when it was very intense work and research for that time period. But other than that, there really was not, um, a lot of–there were memos, there were performance reviews, you know, those kinds of things. But, but the, the intense writing was the grant writing.
Interviewer: Okay. That makes sense. Um, and so just to clarify, so I’m sure I understand that the primary audiences of those grants were the governing [00:03:30] body that was going to distribute the funds and the purpose of the communication was really, um, to secure these funds for these new or continuing programs.
Grantwriter: Right. So for example, we did a certified nursing assistant CNA training. We did medical records, introductory training, we did welding training. So we would–the grants usually had very specific questions. And because my background, I’m proud to say this [00:04:00] because my background was education, unlike I wasn’t a medical person, I wasn’t–that I, I had a good handle on, on curriculum. And after a few years of me writing these grants, the Department of Labor adapted my curriculum style and demand that everybody write their curriculum for review the way I wrote mine.
New Speaker: Interviewer: Huh. Oh that’s amazing.
Grantwriter: I wrote I, and it was a very simple way that I wrote it. It [00:04:30] was just, um, at the end of this unit, the student will be able to, and I listed what the student would be able to do at the end of the work ready industry training at the end of, um, bed making, you know, or whatever. And I was, um, so it was very clear, very concise, and it was all action based. Something that the readers could say, oh, okay, now I know, you know, cause not everybody on the board was a medical person. They were all workplace people. [00:05:00] It was a workforce development board. And they came from all walks of life within the community. So my primary goal was to make my writing accessible to people who weren’t just like me, who were not necessarily in that, in that field. Um, and I don’t know if I answered your question?
Interviewer: You did beautifully. Yes. Yeah, that’s great. That’s really helpful. And so thinking about these grants, you know, you talked about research [00:05:30] and you talked about the way you sort of frame them and structure them. Could you maybe walk us through the process of a typical grant, like from beginning to end, like how you start the project, what those steps are in the middle, if there’s feedback and revision, sort of what that process looks like.
Grantwriter: Yes, it’s a very boring thing–
New Speaker: Not to me, I promise.
Grantwriter: Um, the first thing honestly, um, and I think this is true with any kind of writing that you do business [00:06:00] writing, uh, any kind of variety is you have to know what the reader wants. And the biggest mistake that I think anybody makes, who writes is you write what you, what you want to say instead of what you need the reader to hear. And there’s a real, there’s a real disconnect there. And I’ve been involved with, with people outside of work who want help writing grants and they don’t like it when I slash and [00:06:30] burn because they want, they want to write what they want, what they want to say, not what the person needs to hear. So the first thing you have to do with writing a grant is to really know the funding source because you have to gear whatever you’re gonna tell them to them. Um, I had a situation where I was helping the nursing department write a grant and that was doctors [00:07:00] who were, and they, they wanted, they put in $1 million worth of equipment that they wanted. And I kept telling them this grant is not to outfit your labs. This grant is to get people into the nursing profession. And of course they didn’t get any money because a doctor is not going to listen to me because he just, he wrote a shopping list. He didn’t pay attention to what the–I always [00:07:30] would say you got other people that will have the cookies in the cookie jar is what you have to pay attention to. That’s the biggest thing. That’s the biggest thing is you have to know–that’s your research. You have to know who these people are, what is it that they want. And that’s before you ever, you know, go to the computer. And you have to read every single bit of the RFP really carefully to make sure that you’re responding to the RFP. Not [00:08:00] saying what you wanna say, but responding to the RFP. And that’s, that’s like a big rookie mistake. Um, and then when I write a grant, I think of it as it’s a piece of persuasive writing. My job is to persuade you to give me money and there’s a hundred people asking for this money. So my job is to say why I should get it first and I should get everything that I want. [00:08:30] So my, my approach has always been to start out with this is how much money I’m asking for. This is how many students I’m gonna train with this money. This is how many I’m going to graduate. This is how many hours each person is gonna get. And so here’s your cost hour per student. And then [00:09:00] that’s it. As far as what I’m asking for. Now, the rest of my grant is, is explaining to them why I’m the one who should get that money. So the rest is not about the ask. I’ve already done the ask up front. So now the rest of my grant is to talk about the, the professionalism of my organization and why community colleges are the best to do this type of [00:09:30] training. And um, one of their, the complaints that I used to get at the meetings was that our salaries were high because we have no–we’re a nonprofit, we’re still state funded and so I have to pay the same salaries as everybody else. So I would say knowing that was going to be a question, I would anticipate that and say, even though a lot of our money goes into salaries, salaries aren’t direct contact with students. [00:10:00] We’re not asking for rent. We’re not asking for you for computers. We’re not asking for–because our colleges applying those things. So I would look for the incentives for them to give us the money rather than, uh, the Salvation Army, for example. Nothing against the Salvation Army, but they were, they were one of our competitions, but they were lower paying, but they didn’t have all staff [00:10:30] who are college graduates. They didn’t have staff who were all teachers. And I never mentioned that, but I just always said what we had that maybe other organizations didn’t. So that’s where the persuasion came out.
Interviewer: Oh, that’s great. That’s really fascinating. And in terms of feedback, once you had a version drafted, was it reviewed by someone else or were you really the sole person with ownership of the project?
Grantwriter: I would, um, well it’s, that’s funny because in the beginning, [00:11:00] um, more people looked at it and then they, they would, you know, make some changes. And I had, um, if for different programs, I had a couple of secretaries and so they, they, they would look at it in terms of, you know, run it through spellcheck, although, um, things like that as an English major, I didn’t really have too many issues with that. Um, they, people in the president’s office would look at it real quickly in terms [00:11:30] of, um, budget. But after a while, as I said, over the years, I only ever didn’t get funded one time. Um, it was like okay, just they just signed off on it.
Interviewer: Okay. Okay. Um, and so how did you know how to perform this specific kind of writing?
Grantwriter: You know what? I don’t know how [00:12:00] I knew…I’ve thought about that and, and I suppose maybe it’s a skill. I happen to be a very logical person. I could never write a story. In college, I had a creative writing class and you didn’t have to turn things in. It was like people just wrote stuff and then you critiqued it and all that. And in desperation, I can’t even tell you what I wrote, but I did write a, [00:12:30] a story cause I knew I had to write something, the whole semester, but my mind doesn’t work in terms of, of the–I’m a big fiction reader, I probably read two, three books a week. But my mind doesn’t work that way. My mind tends to work in a very logical kind of a way. Um, I’ve done the Myers Briggs and I’ve scored real high on the, the thinking part. Not [00:13:00] so much some of the, some of the others, but I think the Myers Briggs taught me, uh, that I, because I then used to teach it a little bit to some of our students as a way of saying–essentially the people in professional development classes where they didn’t understand why they couldn’t yell at a boss if the boss yelled at them, um, about how other people see things. So even though I knew [00:13:30] I was a logical person, I knew, I learned that I had to appeal to people whose decision making was not necessarily logical. Huh. Was maybe more so I had to, you know, so at sometimes in these grants I will put a little story in about Susie Q became a CNA and then went on to become an LPN or she was with the first time–um, [00:14:00] she was so excited that she had a job where she, um, but not a paycheck and didn’t even mind paying her taxes because she–instead of getting welfare, she was contributing. So, so I think my logic led me to believe that–if that makes any sense–that logically I had to appeal to things besides the logic.
Interviewer: Yes. Yes. That’s a great explanation actually. Yeah. That, that makes a lot of sense to me. And it’s a really interesting way of thinking [00:14:30] of it.
Grantwriter: Because again the pose again, you’re, if you’re writing, I think of it and even in, in teaching, I think in terms of like the SPCA commercials that are on TV or the St. Jude commercials, and I think that those are great ways to teach writing using what everybody has in common with these things. So give you the ask, please send us $19 a month, but the rest of the commercial is for you to–why should you have all the [00:15:00] places you could spend money and God knows everybody has got their hand out asking for clarity–why should you send money to the SPCA? And so they don’t kill you with logic. They show you all these sad dogs and St. Jude’s shows you these children and their, and the children are doing the speaking. And so you don’t do it because it’s $19 a month. You do it because of the appeal. You’re persuaded [00:15:30] by the appeal, not by the logic.
Interviewer: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s–without getting a digressing too much, I’ll say I use those commercials in my writing classes at the university actually. Yeah, I agree they’re–they’re beautiful way to sort of illustrate how to accomplish, how to accomplish what you did as you’re trying to accomplish.
Grantwriter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, I, you know, I, I think I’ve pretty much figured it out on my own. And as I said, I had a really good back–I mean, in high school I had [00:16:00] a high school that drummed English into your head, you know, usage. And my eighth grade teacher, who I loved dearly, he used to write sentences over a hundred words on the board that we had to diagram. And to me that was always fun. So that’s a talent or an interest or a skill with language is something that comes naturally to me and it intrigues me.
Interviewer: [00:16:30] That’s great. Yeah. And that sort of speaks to this next question. Was there a time in this role as the department chair that you felt unprepared, um, to write one of these grants? Or did it always, was it always a pretty logical, um, preparation you sort of knew what to do and knew how to tackle it?
Grantwriter: Well, I started out not as the person who did that because they were doing that before I came [00:17:00] in, before I worked there. I started out as an instructor and then because of my background, they would ask me to do the proofing. And I would say, you need to change this. You need to change that. And I’m like, yeah, you’re right. That’s not that, let’s write that curriculum this way with, you know, these with the objectives. Let’s not say that we’re going to teach this, we’re going to teach that little. Let’s say this is what the student’s gonna learn. So, so in that way, [00:17:30] I, I moved into a structure that already existed, but changed that structure. From the, from, you know, from somebody, some people were doing it for years and honestly, people were receptive. Um, you know, you know how people are not accepted, receptive to you changing their writing. That’s very painful. Right? Um, being yourself [00:18:00] editor is much harder than being a writer, editing your own work is the party, but that’s their child. Um, so by the time I was doing it as department chair, it really, it was more agonizing for me to get the word I wanted, the sentence I wanted. Lots of times grants had limited amount of space to write. You can only do so many pages. [00:18:30] So the part that was agonizing to me was to put the most in to those pages. So I would write it and then I would say, well, make this a parenthetical phrase, I’ll make it a whole sentence, because then you could get five less words.
Interviewer: Right. Right.
Grantwriter: And so through being told how many pages only I could submit, it made me a, certainly a better, more cohesive, more focused writer.
Interviewer: Oh, that’s [00:19:00] great. Yeah. How long did you typically have to write one grant? You mentioned this sort of timeline for Department of Labor grants. On average, was it a couple of months, a couple of weeks? How long did you work on each one typically?
Grantwriter: Well, with the Department of Labor, they all came in at once, so you may–and you didn’t have to apply for everything of course, but I would typically have a [00:19:30] couple of months to do maybe five or six grants. But as I said, to be honest, I worked off the grant from the year before because they liked it. It was successful. So I wasn’t always starting from scratch. It was rethinking, refreshing, changing things. But I had developed a structure and again, knowing that these were people who were in the workplace, I wanted [00:20:00] to make it as readable and as concise as I possibly could, so I wasn’t wasting their time because that’s gonna make them mad at me and not want to give me money. [laughter] So I wanted to respect the reader’s time. Um, so I think those were my focuses were outward in order to get a good product inward, if that makes sense.
Interviewer: It does. It does. Absolutely. And now looking back [00:20:30] much further than that, back to when you were a college student. You talked about having a great high school education. Um, what kinds of writing do you remember being asked to create as a college student?
Grantwriter: Well, as an English major, I, I’ll tell you that I think the best course that I ever had other than keyboarding, which was once was in high school typing, um, was a class called Language and Communication. [00:21:00] And the book was written by a, I still have it and I graduated in college, in 1968, the book was written by [inaudible]. And it was really about the use of language, how language communicated, which was not something I ever thought about. You know, you were, you were, you were worried about, you know, subject, verb agreement in term papers and, and [00:21:30] APA style–things that are totally useless in the workplace, cares about footnotes in the workplace. Um, but the Language and Communication taught me to focus on, on the relationship between–whether it’s the speaker and the listener, the writer and the reader, the teacher and the learner. Because teaching and learning are not the same thing. And writing and reading aren’t, there’s a disconnect [00:22:00] there. So, um, one of the favorite things in that class was cow one is not cow two, Huh. And, and I always remembered that. And when I was teaching some communication, I used to have everybody draw a dog and then everybody would show their dog. And then we would talk about how, my, my direction, as the speaker gave everybody in the room a different picture of what a dog was. And that’s, [00:22:30] that’s, that’s a thing in communication that, that we have to pay attention to that you don’t interpret by words the way I mean them. And so I have to be really careful with my words. Right. Um, and I’ve never, that course fascinated me. Um, you know, that was an eye opener for an 18 year old. And then I, I had, you know, two semesters of linguistics and there was a lot of writing [00:23:00] in there and the professor just, you know, all of us who were English majors, we all thought we knew how to write because that’s why we are not, we didn’t feel like high school and he just tore into everything. Um, I think my, there, I remember my very first paper, I got a C- or D and it was shocking that I wasn’t anywhere near as good a writer as I [laughter] [00:23:30] and, and as an English major, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of writing. So, um, I can specifically say when I learned about writing other than I learned about communication, and then I know obviously I did because I went from these, you know, C’s and D’s do and I think a B in the, in the linguistics class. But, but you know, I, I think you learn [00:24:00] if you, you’ve got to be, you got to self edit you, you’ve got to, you can’t admire your own work. You’ve got to be able to take a step back and be critical of your own work. And I, and I know I learned that in my linguistics class and then all the other English classes, I know that there were, there were papers, but a lot of them I think were graded more on content. And maybe by then we were all decent enough writers, [00:24:30] or at least I know my own, maybe it was decent enough that it was more based on content as an organization, you know?
Interviewer: Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Are there things, looking back, are there things that would have been useful for you to learn as a college student that would have made some of the workplace writing you ended up doing easier or would have made you more adaptable to it?
Grantwriter: Well, writing [00:25:00] is specific to purpose and academic writing is academic. Um, and as I said, you know, when, when you had to write research papers for any course, it was the focus was on making sure that you can follow, um, because of AP, I forget now, APA Style and that you, [00:25:30] you did your footnotes and you numbered them and you– there was so much emphasis on academic writing that has no transference into the business world. And I think when you’re an academic, lots of academics have never worked in the business world. And so the kind of writing and the kind of publishing that they do is academic. [00:26:00] And, um, you know, when you go into the business world, of course when I was in college, it wasn’t an email, but some of the, the most hurt feelings and that the problems and relationships come from people’s interpretation of an email as being critical or nasty when actually as the writer, you were just in a hurry. And people’s feelings get hurt because you didn’t say please and thank you. You said we’re meeting, we’re meeting at noon, bring your lunch, [00:26:30] and people get all upset because it comes out as a command or rude or you know, and, and none of that transfers to the workplace. Um, because it’s all–now somebody told me, and, and again, I haven’t done a long time since I’ve done academic writing, that there are now programs that will help you with your footnotes and numbering and that kind of thing that, that make it maybe less onerous. But, um, [00:27:00] but I often, I used to think as a, once I started doing workplace teaching, I used to think every teacher, especially every English teacher or every college professor needs to spend their summers in the business.
Interviewer: That’s interesting, yeah.
Grantwriter: And learn how business people write. And how business people speak. Um, and, and it’s not at all the way you write in academia? [00:27:30] Not at all. I would say that that to me is, is um, you know–yeah I learned you learn usage, you learn organization, you learn some of those things, but that’s not necessarily the things that businesses focus on.
Interviewer: Right, right. This is sort of a, a bigger question, but could you talk a little bit about what was at stake in this grant writing?
Grantwriter: What was [00:28:00] at stake was the employment of my staff because it was, everything was grant funded. As I say, we were not on the um, the state payroll, as such. So there was a lot of pressure. I, when I retired it was like, woo! Because it was a lot of pressure. Once you got a grant, say I got a grant that for four or five job [00:28:30] training programs and I would mingle certain staff among those programs because different people could teach work readiness, basic math, um, study skills. I taught a lot of study skills. Um, but maybe there was a time when I had 40 people employed through grants and if you don’t get that grant the following year, that’s 40 people out of a job. [00:29:00] And so the, the pressure with the writing was basically to keep people employed. And it sounds harsh because you’d think, well, what about the people that weren’t getting the training? Well, they were going to get it somewhere else if I didn’t give it to them because the money was still gonna be there, it was just going to go to some other organization. But, but, and also it was the college’s reputation. It was my personal reputation that [00:29:30] was on the line. So the, there were those kinds of things at stake. Which didn’t happen in the other part of the college, you know, they, when I had a program and I was–and I had money in my budget to buy software that was required, the people on the, on the academic side would get a little annoyed, oh yeah, look, you can do this, you can do that. And I would think, yeah, this year! Next year I may not be here and you will be. [laughter]
Interviewer: [00:30:00] What would you say is the most difficult thing about that very specific sort of grant writing? Is it the pressure? Is there something, is it about, as you mentioned, sort of really tailoring toward the reader. What would you say is the most challenging element of grant writing in that position?
Grantwriter: Well, one, I’ll give you an example of a grant that was kind of new to me was the college had–and we have [00:30:30] our college is a statewide institution because Delaware is so small. So we have campuses in each county, but it was unlike most community colleges that are county based. Ours was state. Um, so we had at my campus and I worked at three different campuses, ending up at the Dover campus and each campus had its own culture, which was interesting. Talk about business culture. We had a grant for Upward Bound, which was [00:31:00] a program for high school students and it was my first federal Department of Education grant. So that’s a good example of, of the challenge. And it was who are these people and, and really what do they want Upward Bound to do? To take the educational-ese out of it. And what is it that we’re supposed to actually [00:31:30] do with these students? And I read grants at a previous brand. They were, they were 4-year grants. So you’re talking about a lot of jobs and also now, because it’s high school, you’re talking about a lot of kids, if you lose the grant, those kids–their program is over. So, so the challenge for in a new grant like that was really getting into what the heck are we supposed to do and how do [00:32:00] I express what we’re supposed to do and how do I answer the questions? Because there were like 10 questions that you had to answer. How do I answer these questions? And I’m not even sure I really understand because of the way they’re written. How do I know that I’m responding appropriately? [inaudible] is what they’ve done before. Because when I read [00:32:30] what they’d done before, I didn’t like the way it was written at all. Um, and each question had points, so there were people who do, and you could volunteer you to be a reader and there were people that went to Washington for a weekend once a year on these grants because they were on a staggered basis, but they went there and they read and each question was scored a number of points. So [00:33:00] you really had to make sure that each question was answered thoroughly, that they understood because they were reading so many. And, and if you lost one point per question, you were down to one 90 and you probably weren’t getting funded. So I think the biggest challenge was really figuring out what they wanted and responding in such a way that you were giving them what [00:33:30] they wanted.
Interviewer: That makes a lot of sense. That explanation is really interesting too, especially the point system. That’s fascinating. Yeah.
Grantwriter: Yeah. Because one person could destroy you if they didn’t like what you wrote, out of four readers.
Interviewer: In your role as department chair, as you were writing these grants, did anyone help you with your writing formally or informally?
Grantwriter: No. Because I was, I was the expert. [00:34:00] Um, again, people would look at the budget and, and et cetera. Um, but not– people came to me from other campuses to review their. Rather than, um–and, in fact you could go to a professional grant writer and I, I decided one year that I was with this Upward Bound, I wasn’t going to have anybody writing that would [00:34:30] never happen and I wouldn’t have the money to pay somebody and just have them read, have them review it. And she had done workshops. I had been to her workshop, which we paid a lot of money, but this was so new to me I wanted all the information I could yet. So I went to her workshop, I went to the Department of Education workshop, I did all this and I had her review it and I thought, she’s nuts! Why is she [inaudible]. That’s really sounds very [00:35:00] egotistical. [laughter] But the funny part, I’ll tell you what the funny part is, uh, the, the ironic part is this professional–is she had people paid her to write their grants and she got caught falsifying the postmark. She had gotten a hold of somehow a postal postmark stamp. And so let’s say it had to be postmarked by tonight at [00:35:30] midnight and because she was behind and she got ahold of this stamp and all 10 people that they did the Department of, of Education, figuring out all these 10 grants that came in like a day later than most of the others, even though they have it correct postmark, l were all done by her. And all of those people, they all–none of them got their money. Because they were not factually postmarked. [00:36:00] It’s truly not something you can put, I couldn’t responsibly ever put it in anybody else’s hands.
Interviewer: Yeah. As you think about your evolution as a writer, you–I wish we had more time to talk about your whole career, but as you think about your career, as varied as it was, how do you think you evolved or improved as a writer?
Grantwriter: I [00:36:30] think I’m developed, again, as I know I’ve stressed this before, but I developed a greater appreciation for the reader. Because that’s the only purpose in my writing was for the reader. So, and everything that I wrote, I measured it against accessibility, interest, et cetera, to [00:37:00] the reader, not to myself. And, and I will tell you, um, a person in this area put out a call for somebody to go over his little book that he’d written and I didn’t see anybody else respond. So I said I would, and I don’t know, I’ve never met him. And he emailed it to me and I, and I did it. And I said that I can give you some editorial ideas if you’re interested. I didn’t–I said, I’m pretty tough. And he said, [00:37:30] yes, he would like them. And he took the first couple that I sent and I haven’t heard from him since. I think, I think he’s angry with me, but I explained to him that I’m an advocate for the reader, that there’s no reason for me to write other than to reach my audience. And I think that if I had to pick one thing, it would be, it’s not to hear the sound of my own voice. And that’s what [00:38:00] most of us writers love the sound of our voices, but it was focus on the reader, focus on the reader.
Interviewer: Right. That’s great. I have just a couple more questions and the second to last one is, um, to what extent did you see writing as valued in the community college, you know, in the, the department that you were working with then? Um, how valued was writing?
Interviewer: [00:38:30] Um, I can’t tell you that writing was valued–it was the results of the writing. The kind of writing that I did. You know, I, and I know that’s typical of colleges in general. The president would put out articles, but he didn’t write them. They came out in his name, but he wasn’t going to bother writing them, you know, other people wrote them. Um, he was too busy, you know, doing other things. [00:39:00] Um, and so I would say I got recognition for my results, not from my writing at the college, but again, it goes back to the reader where I got recognition for my writing was from the Department of Labor, from those people who read my writing.
Interviewer: Right. That makes sense. Yeah. [00:39:30] Um, so how did you define successful writing when you were a student versus successful writing as a grant writer? And would you say that you were a successful grant writer? I can tell what I think the answer is, but..[Laughter]
Grantwriter: Yeah, I mean, I just wrote as that, as I said when we first got acquainted through Patrick, um, is that I had just worked on a, uh, I live in the community [00:40:00] that has our own little lake–a manmade lake–and it’s been around for years, and it needs a lot of assistance now. And it costs money. It’s like people say it is like to have a boat. It’s a hole in the ground that you pour money into, and I, and I just finished writing, um, a grant for this. Now I’ve lost track of your question. I’m sorry.
Interviewer: Oh no, that’s okay. Well, well this, I think you’re answering the second part of it.
Grantwriter: Refresh me on that. The question though, so I can get–
Interviewer: Of course. [00:40:30] How did you define successful writing as a student versus as a grant writer and also would you say you’re a successful workplace writer?
Grantwriter: Okay. Okay. So, um, and as I wrote this, I’m almost 90% sure we’re not going to get the money. Um, but not because of my writing. It just because we’re new to this organization and, and there’s maybe others in greater need and we’re private. I don’t know. But, [00:41:00] but I would say I always felt successful as a grant writer and I was, um, because I was pleased again, I agonized over it, but I was pleased with the result of my agony. Um, uh, and after I retired, Delaware, being a small as it is and everybody knowing everybody, my mother, my daughter’s mother-in-law was good friends with [00:41:30] the college vice president for finance. And he said to her, oh, you’re Janet Edwards is —-your daughter’s married, or your son’s married to Janet Edwards’s daughter, and I know Janet and blah, blah, blah. And he said–the most validation I ever got–he said, we have not had anybody who could replace her. He said she was a worker. We’ve lost so much [00:42:00] after she retired–you know, words to that effect.
Interviewer: What a wonderful compliment. Yeah.
Grantwriter: And yes, and it was wonderful and it was, it was kind of gratifying, almost in a nasty way, [laughter] only because again, when you’re not in the academic side, when you are in the more–I should say practical side, but when you’re in there, you got to earn your own keeps side. You’re looked down upon. There’s a, there’s that class distinction among the real [00:42:30] faculty and the, and the people on continuing ed that don’t have credit courses. So that was kind of a vindication, you know, when, when I heard that. Um, the first part of your question was about–?
Interviewer: Defining success. How would you define successful writing when you were a student versus successful writing as a grant writer.
Grantwriter: Right. Okay. I think defining successful writing as a student is whatever the instructor or teacher said [00:43:00] it was. They gave you a grade. If you got an A, you were a good writer. If you got a C you were not such a good writer. I mean I don’t think it was ever in terms of the work that I did. It was in terms of the grade as we were writing for a grade.
Interviewer: And, and in terms of how that shifted to success as a grant writer, was it–
Grantwriter: When I had a purpose, I had a purpose in writing. [00:43:30] It wasn’t for–it was more tied to a goal other than getting through a course.
Interviewer: And would you judge the success of grant writing purely by whether or not the grant was awarded?
Grantwriter: No, no. Because I guess I don’t think we’re going to get this grant. And I, I think, I think the grant was, was pretty well written. Um, because you, you, you’re not always gonna get it. Um, but I, I think I judged it over the [00:44:00] years, again, by the, the reaction of reader. And the fact that the Department of Labor in particular, um, adjusted their, their RFPs cause they liked how I wrote it. So, I mean, I think that that’s about as much of a compliment as you can get when somebody changes what they’re doing because they like what you’re too.
Interviewer: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Grantwriter: A Department Chair of workforce training and development at Delaware technical and community college and, uh, throughout the state of Delaware.
Interviewer: Great. And um, how long has it been since you graduated from college?
Grantwriter: My undergraduate degree was 1968.
Interviewer: Great. Okay. Um, and [00:00:30] how long did you work in the community college world?
Grantwriter: Oh, about a total of between part-time and full time, 25, 26 years or something like that. I don’t know exactly, but around there. More than 20 years.
Interviewer: Wow. Okay, wonderful. Um, and could you provide us with a brief description of your primary job functions in that department chair position?
Grantwriter: As a department chair, my primary [00:01:00] function was to write grants for government funded programs, state and local government, and then go before a panel of workforce development people to present the reason that they should give us this grant. The grant was–the grants were all for job training and work readiness for unemployed or low-income people or people returning to the workplace. And then when we received the grant, which [00:01:30] I received–[there was ] maybe only one I didn’t get over the 10 years I was a department chair. Um, when we got the grant then my job was to make sure we had the staff, make sure the curriculum goes–there really weren’t many books that would address these specific jobs. Um, hire subject matter experts and make sure that they knew how to teach, manage the budget, um, get the students jobs [00:02:00] after they graduated, and then report back to the, the workforce development board.
Interviewer: Excellent. In a given week, what percentage of your job required writing?
Grantwriter: I would not say that there was any percentage in a given week. The writing when, when it was done was intense. So it might–I might not write anything for weeks at a time. And then for example, [00:02:30] Department of Labor grants would all be due in January. So I had six grants, um, that I would have to have written by January in order to submit. So October through December, uh, the main part of my job would be writing the grants. So it would depend, it depended whenever, um, whenever an opportunity for [00:03:00] a grant arose, that’s, that was when it was very intense work and research for that time period. But other than that, there really was not, um, a lot of–there were memos, there were performance reviews, you know, those kinds of things. But, but the, the intense writing was the grant writing.
Interviewer: Okay. That makes sense. Um, and so just to clarify, so I’m sure I understand that the primary audiences of those grants were the governing [00:03:30] body that was going to distribute the funds and the purpose of the communication was really, um, to secure these funds for these new or continuing programs.
Grantwriter: Right. So for example, we did a certified nursing assistant CNA training. We did medical records, introductory training, we did welding training. So we would–the grants usually had very specific questions. And because my background, I’m proud to say this [00:04:00] because my background was education, unlike I wasn’t a medical person, I wasn’t–that I, I had a good handle on, on curriculum. And after a few years of me writing these grants, the Department of Labor adapted my curriculum style and demand that everybody write their curriculum for review the way I wrote mine.
New Speaker: Interviewer: Huh. Oh that’s amazing.
Grantwriter: I wrote I, and it was a very simple way that I wrote it. It [00:04:30] was just, um, at the end of this unit, the student will be able to, and I listed what the student would be able to do at the end of the work ready industry training at the end of, um, bed making, you know, or whatever. And I was, um, so it was very clear, very concise, and it was all action based. Something that the readers could say, oh, okay, now I know, you know, cause not everybody on the board was a medical person. They were all workplace people. [00:05:00] It was a workforce development board. And they came from all walks of life within the community. So my primary goal was to make my writing accessible to people who weren’t just like me, who were not necessarily in that, in that field. Um, and I don’t know if I answered your question?
Interviewer: You did beautifully. Yes. Yeah, that’s great. That’s really helpful. And so thinking about these grants, you know, you talked about research [00:05:30] and you talked about the way you sort of frame them and structure them. Could you maybe walk us through the process of a typical grant, like from beginning to end, like how you start the project, what those steps are in the middle, if there’s feedback and revision, sort of what that process looks like.
Grantwriter: Yes, it’s a very boring thing–
New Speaker: Not to me, I promise.
Grantwriter: Um, the first thing honestly, um, and I think this is true with any kind of writing that you do business [00:06:00] writing, uh, any kind of variety is you have to know what the reader wants. And the biggest mistake that I think anybody makes, who writes is you write what you, what you want to say instead of what you need the reader to hear. And there’s a real, there’s a real disconnect there. And I’ve been involved with, with people outside of work who want help writing grants and they don’t like it when I slash and [00:06:30] burn because they want, they want to write what they want, what they want to say, not what the person needs to hear. So the first thing you have to do with writing a grant is to really know the funding source because you have to gear whatever you’re gonna tell them to them. Um, I had a situation where I was helping the nursing department write a grant and that was doctors [00:07:00] who were, and they, they wanted, they put in $1 million worth of equipment that they wanted. And I kept telling them this grant is not to outfit your labs. This grant is to get people into the nursing profession. And of course they didn’t get any money because a doctor is not going to listen to me because he just, he wrote a shopping list. He didn’t pay attention to what the–I always [00:07:30] would say you got other people that will have the cookies in the cookie jar is what you have to pay attention to. That’s the biggest thing. That’s the biggest thing is you have to know–that’s your research. You have to know who these people are, what is it that they want. And that’s before you ever, you know, go to the computer. And you have to read every single bit of the RFP really carefully to make sure that you’re responding to the RFP. Not [00:08:00] saying what you wanna say, but responding to the RFP. And that’s, that’s like a big rookie mistake. Um, and then when I write a grant, I think of it as it’s a piece of persuasive writing. My job is to persuade you to give me money and there’s a hundred people asking for this money. So my job is to say why I should get it first and I should get everything that I want. [00:08:30] So my, my approach has always been to start out with this is how much money I’m asking for. This is how many students I’m gonna train with this money. This is how many I’m going to graduate. This is how many hours each person is gonna get. And so here’s your cost hour per student. And then [00:09:00] that’s it. As far as what I’m asking for. Now, the rest of my grant is, is explaining to them why I’m the one who should get that money. So the rest is not about the ask. I’ve already done the ask up front. So now the rest of my grant is to talk about the, the professionalism of my organization and why community colleges are the best to do this type of [00:09:30] training. And um, one of their, the complaints that I used to get at the meetings was that our salaries were high because we have no–we’re a nonprofit, we’re still state funded and so I have to pay the same salaries as everybody else. So I would say knowing that was going to be a question, I would anticipate that and say, even though a lot of our money goes into salaries, salaries aren’t direct contact with students. [00:10:00] We’re not asking for rent. We’re not asking for you for computers. We’re not asking for–because our colleges applying those things. So I would look for the incentives for them to give us the money rather than, uh, the Salvation Army, for example. Nothing against the Salvation Army, but they were, they were one of our competitions, but they were lower paying, but they didn’t have all staff [00:10:30] who are college graduates. They didn’t have staff who were all teachers. And I never mentioned that, but I just always said what we had that maybe other organizations didn’t. So that’s where the persuasion came out.
Interviewer: Oh, that’s great. That’s really fascinating. And in terms of feedback, once you had a version drafted, was it reviewed by someone else or were you really the sole person with ownership of the project?
Grantwriter: I would, um, well it’s, that’s funny because in the beginning, [00:11:00] um, more people looked at it and then they, they would, you know, make some changes. And I had, um, if for different programs, I had a couple of secretaries and so they, they, they would look at it in terms of, you know, run it through spellcheck, although, um, things like that as an English major, I didn’t really have too many issues with that. Um, they, people in the president’s office would look at it real quickly in terms [00:11:30] of, um, budget. But after a while, as I said, over the years, I only ever didn’t get funded one time. Um, it was like okay, just they just signed off on it.
Interviewer: Okay. Okay. Um, and so how did you know how to perform this specific kind of writing?
Grantwriter: You know what? I don’t know how [00:12:00] I knew…I’ve thought about that and, and I suppose maybe it’s a skill. I happen to be a very logical person. I could never write a story. In college, I had a creative writing class and you didn’t have to turn things in. It was like people just wrote stuff and then you critiqued it and all that. And in desperation, I can’t even tell you what I wrote, but I did write a, [00:12:30] a story cause I knew I had to write something, the whole semester, but my mind doesn’t work in terms of, of the–I’m a big fiction reader, I probably read two, three books a week. But my mind doesn’t work that way. My mind tends to work in a very logical kind of a way. Um, I’ve done the Myers Briggs and I’ve scored real high on the, the thinking part. Not [00:13:00] so much some of the, some of the others, but I think the Myers Briggs taught me, uh, that I, because I then used to teach it a little bit to some of our students as a way of saying–essentially the people in professional development classes where they didn’t understand why they couldn’t yell at a boss if the boss yelled at them, um, about how other people see things. So even though I knew [00:13:30] I was a logical person, I knew, I learned that I had to appeal to people whose decision making was not necessarily logical. Huh. Was maybe more so I had to, you know, so at sometimes in these grants I will put a little story in about Susie Q became a CNA and then went on to become an LPN or she was with the first time–um, [00:14:00] she was so excited that she had a job where she, um, but not a paycheck and didn’t even mind paying her taxes because she–instead of getting welfare, she was contributing. So, so I think my logic led me to believe that–if that makes any sense–that logically I had to appeal to things besides the logic.
Interviewer: Yes. Yes. That’s a great explanation actually. Yeah. That, that makes a lot of sense to me. And it’s a really interesting way of thinking [00:14:30] of it.
Grantwriter: Because again the pose again, you’re, if you’re writing, I think of it and even in, in teaching, I think in terms of like the SPCA commercials that are on TV or the St. Jude commercials, and I think that those are great ways to teach writing using what everybody has in common with these things. So give you the ask, please send us $19 a month, but the rest of the commercial is for you to–why should you have all the [00:15:00] places you could spend money and God knows everybody has got their hand out asking for clarity–why should you send money to the SPCA? And so they don’t kill you with logic. They show you all these sad dogs and St. Jude’s shows you these children and their, and the children are doing the speaking. And so you don’t do it because it’s $19 a month. You do it because of the appeal. You’re persuaded [00:15:30] by the appeal, not by the logic.
Interviewer: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s–without getting a digressing too much, I’ll say I use those commercials in my writing classes at the university actually. Yeah, I agree they’re–they’re beautiful way to sort of illustrate how to accomplish, how to accomplish what you did as you’re trying to accomplish.
Grantwriter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, I, you know, I, I think I’ve pretty much figured it out on my own. And as I said, I had a really good back–I mean, in high school I had [00:16:00] a high school that drummed English into your head, you know, usage. And my eighth grade teacher, who I loved dearly, he used to write sentences over a hundred words on the board that we had to diagram. And to me that was always fun. So that’s a talent or an interest or a skill with language is something that comes naturally to me and it intrigues me.
Interviewer: [00:16:30] That’s great. Yeah. And that sort of speaks to this next question. Was there a time in this role as the department chair that you felt unprepared, um, to write one of these grants? Or did it always, was it always a pretty logical, um, preparation you sort of knew what to do and knew how to tackle it?
Grantwriter: Well, I started out not as the person who did that because they were doing that before I came [00:17:00] in, before I worked there. I started out as an instructor and then because of my background, they would ask me to do the proofing. And I would say, you need to change this. You need to change that. And I’m like, yeah, you’re right. That’s not that, let’s write that curriculum this way with, you know, these with the objectives. Let’s not say that we’re going to teach this, we’re going to teach that little. Let’s say this is what the student’s gonna learn. So, so in that way, [00:17:30] I, I moved into a structure that already existed, but changed that structure. From the, from, you know, from somebody, some people were doing it for years and honestly, people were receptive. Um, you know, you know how people are not accepted, receptive to you changing their writing. That’s very painful. Right? Um, being yourself [00:18:00] editor is much harder than being a writer, editing your own work is the party, but that’s their child. Um, so by the time I was doing it as department chair, it really, it was more agonizing for me to get the word I wanted, the sentence I wanted. Lots of times grants had limited amount of space to write. You can only do so many pages. [00:18:30] So the part that was agonizing to me was to put the most in to those pages. So I would write it and then I would say, well, make this a parenthetical phrase, I’ll make it a whole sentence, because then you could get five less words.
Interviewer: Right. Right.
Grantwriter: And so through being told how many pages only I could submit, it made me a, certainly a better, more cohesive, more focused writer.
Interviewer: Oh, that’s [00:19:00] great. Yeah. How long did you typically have to write one grant? You mentioned this sort of timeline for Department of Labor grants. On average, was it a couple of months, a couple of weeks? How long did you work on each one typically?
Grantwriter: Well, with the Department of Labor, they all came in at once, so you may–and you didn’t have to apply for everything of course, but I would typically have a [00:19:30] couple of months to do maybe five or six grants. But as I said, to be honest, I worked off the grant from the year before because they liked it. It was successful. So I wasn’t always starting from scratch. It was rethinking, refreshing, changing things. But I had developed a structure and again, knowing that these were people who were in the workplace, I wanted [00:20:00] to make it as readable and as concise as I possibly could, so I wasn’t wasting their time because that’s gonna make them mad at me and not want to give me money. [laughter] So I wanted to respect the reader’s time. Um, so I think those were my focuses were outward in order to get a good product inward, if that makes sense.
Interviewer: It does. It does. Absolutely. And now looking back [00:20:30] much further than that, back to when you were a college student. You talked about having a great high school education. Um, what kinds of writing do you remember being asked to create as a college student?
Grantwriter: Well, as an English major, I, I’ll tell you that I think the best course that I ever had other than keyboarding, which was once was in high school typing, um, was a class called Language and Communication. [00:21:00] And the book was written by a, I still have it and I graduated in college, in 1968, the book was written by [inaudible]. And it was really about the use of language, how language communicated, which was not something I ever thought about. You know, you were, you were, you were worried about, you know, subject, verb agreement in term papers and, and [00:21:30] APA style–things that are totally useless in the workplace, cares about footnotes in the workplace. Um, but the Language and Communication taught me to focus on, on the relationship between–whether it’s the speaker and the listener, the writer and the reader, the teacher and the learner. Because teaching and learning are not the same thing. And writing and reading aren’t, there’s a disconnect [00:22:00] there. So, um, one of the favorite things in that class was cow one is not cow two, Huh. And, and I always remembered that. And when I was teaching some communication, I used to have everybody draw a dog and then everybody would show their dog. And then we would talk about how, my, my direction, as the speaker gave everybody in the room a different picture of what a dog was. And that’s, [00:22:30] that’s, that’s a thing in communication that, that we have to pay attention to that you don’t interpret by words the way I mean them. And so I have to be really careful with my words. Right. Um, and I’ve never, that course fascinated me. Um, you know, that was an eye opener for an 18 year old. And then I, I had, you know, two semesters of linguistics and there was a lot of writing [00:23:00] in there and the professor just, you know, all of us who were English majors, we all thought we knew how to write because that’s why we are not, we didn’t feel like high school and he just tore into everything. Um, I think my, there, I remember my very first paper, I got a C- or D and it was shocking that I wasn’t anywhere near as good a writer as I [laughter] [00:23:30] and, and as an English major, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of writing. So, um, I can specifically say when I learned about writing other than I learned about communication, and then I know obviously I did because I went from these, you know, C’s and D’s do and I think a B in the, in the linguistics class. But, but you know, I, I think you learn [00:24:00] if you, you’ve got to be, you got to self edit you, you’ve got to, you can’t admire your own work. You’ve got to be able to take a step back and be critical of your own work. And I, and I know I learned that in my linguistics class and then all the other English classes, I know that there were, there were papers, but a lot of them I think were graded more on content. And maybe by then we were all decent enough writers, [00:24:30] or at least I know my own, maybe it was decent enough that it was more based on content as an organization, you know?
Interviewer: Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Are there things, looking back, are there things that would have been useful for you to learn as a college student that would have made some of the workplace writing you ended up doing easier or would have made you more adaptable to it?
Grantwriter: Well, writing [00:25:00] is specific to purpose and academic writing is academic. Um, and as I said, you know, when, when you had to write research papers for any course, it was the focus was on making sure that you can follow, um, because of AP, I forget now, APA Style and that you, [00:25:30] you did your footnotes and you numbered them and you– there was so much emphasis on academic writing that has no transference into the business world. And I think when you’re an academic, lots of academics have never worked in the business world. And so the kind of writing and the kind of publishing that they do is academic. [00:26:00] And, um, you know, when you go into the business world, of course when I was in college, it wasn’t an email, but some of the, the most hurt feelings and that the problems and relationships come from people’s interpretation of an email as being critical or nasty when actually as the writer, you were just in a hurry. And people’s feelings get hurt because you didn’t say please and thank you. You said we’re meeting, we’re meeting at noon, bring your lunch, [00:26:30] and people get all upset because it comes out as a command or rude or you know, and, and none of that transfers to the workplace. Um, because it’s all–now somebody told me, and, and again, I haven’t done a long time since I’ve done academic writing, that there are now programs that will help you with your footnotes and numbering and that kind of thing that, that make it maybe less onerous. But, um, [00:27:00] but I often, I used to think as a, once I started doing workplace teaching, I used to think every teacher, especially every English teacher or every college professor needs to spend their summers in the business.
Interviewer: That’s interesting, yeah.
Grantwriter: And learn how business people write. And how business people speak. Um, and, and it’s not at all the way you write in academia? [00:27:30] Not at all. I would say that that to me is, is um, you know–yeah I learned you learn usage, you learn organization, you learn some of those things, but that’s not necessarily the things that businesses focus on.
Interviewer: Right, right. This is sort of a, a bigger question, but could you talk a little bit about what was at stake in this grant writing?
Grantwriter: What was [00:28:00] at stake was the employment of my staff because it was, everything was grant funded. As I say, we were not on the um, the state payroll, as such. So there was a lot of pressure. I, when I retired it was like, woo! Because it was a lot of pressure. Once you got a grant, say I got a grant that for four or five job [00:28:30] training programs and I would mingle certain staff among those programs because different people could teach work readiness, basic math, um, study skills. I taught a lot of study skills. Um, but maybe there was a time when I had 40 people employed through grants and if you don’t get that grant the following year, that’s 40 people out of a job. [00:29:00] And so the, the pressure with the writing was basically to keep people employed. And it sounds harsh because you’d think, well, what about the people that weren’t getting the training? Well, they were going to get it somewhere else if I didn’t give it to them because the money was still gonna be there, it was just going to go to some other organization. But, but, and also it was the college’s reputation. It was my personal reputation that [00:29:30] was on the line. So the, there were those kinds of things at stake. Which didn’t happen in the other part of the college, you know, they, when I had a program and I was–and I had money in my budget to buy software that was required, the people on the, on the academic side would get a little annoyed, oh yeah, look, you can do this, you can do that. And I would think, yeah, this year! Next year I may not be here and you will be. [laughter]
Interviewer: [00:30:00] What would you say is the most difficult thing about that very specific sort of grant writing? Is it the pressure? Is there something, is it about, as you mentioned, sort of really tailoring toward the reader. What would you say is the most challenging element of grant writing in that position?
Grantwriter: Well, one, I’ll give you an example of a grant that was kind of new to me was the college had–and we have [00:30:30] our college is a statewide institution because Delaware is so small. So we have campuses in each county, but it was unlike most community colleges that are county based. Ours was state. Um, so we had at my campus and I worked at three different campuses, ending up at the Dover campus and each campus had its own culture, which was interesting. Talk about business culture. We had a grant for Upward Bound, which was [00:31:00] a program for high school students and it was my first federal Department of Education grant. So that’s a good example of, of the challenge. And it was who are these people and, and really what do they want Upward Bound to do? To take the educational-ese out of it. And what is it that we’re supposed to actually [00:31:30] do with these students? And I read grants at a previous brand. They were, they were 4-year grants. So you’re talking about a lot of jobs and also now, because it’s high school, you’re talking about a lot of kids, if you lose the grant, those kids–their program is over. So, so the challenge for in a new grant like that was really getting into what the heck are we supposed to do and how do [00:32:00] I express what we’re supposed to do and how do I answer the questions? Because there were like 10 questions that you had to answer. How do I answer these questions? And I’m not even sure I really understand because of the way they’re written. How do I know that I’m responding appropriately? [inaudible] is what they’ve done before. Because when I read [00:32:30] what they’d done before, I didn’t like the way it was written at all. Um, and each question had points, so there were people who do, and you could volunteer you to be a reader and there were people that went to Washington for a weekend once a year on these grants because they were on a staggered basis, but they went there and they read and each question was scored a number of points. So [00:33:00] you really had to make sure that each question was answered thoroughly, that they understood because they were reading so many. And, and if you lost one point per question, you were down to one 90 and you probably weren’t getting funded. So I think the biggest challenge was really figuring out what they wanted and responding in such a way that you were giving them what [00:33:30] they wanted.
Interviewer: That makes a lot of sense. That explanation is really interesting too, especially the point system. That’s fascinating. Yeah.
Grantwriter: Yeah. Because one person could destroy you if they didn’t like what you wrote, out of four readers.
Interviewer: In your role as department chair, as you were writing these grants, did anyone help you with your writing formally or informally?
Grantwriter: No. Because I was, I was the expert. [00:34:00] Um, again, people would look at the budget and, and et cetera. Um, but not– people came to me from other campuses to review their. Rather than, um–and, in fact you could go to a professional grant writer and I, I decided one year that I was with this Upward Bound, I wasn’t going to have anybody writing that would [00:34:30] never happen and I wouldn’t have the money to pay somebody and just have them read, have them review it. And she had done workshops. I had been to her workshop, which we paid a lot of money, but this was so new to me I wanted all the information I could yet. So I went to her workshop, I went to the Department of Education workshop, I did all this and I had her review it and I thought, she’s nuts! Why is she [inaudible]. That’s really sounds very [00:35:00] egotistical. [laughter] But the funny part, I’ll tell you what the funny part is, uh, the, the ironic part is this professional–is she had people paid her to write their grants and she got caught falsifying the postmark. She had gotten a hold of somehow a postal postmark stamp. And so let’s say it had to be postmarked by tonight at [00:35:30] midnight and because she was behind and she got ahold of this stamp and all 10 people that they did the Department of, of Education, figuring out all these 10 grants that came in like a day later than most of the others, even though they have it correct postmark, l were all done by her. And all of those people, they all–none of them got their money. Because they were not factually postmarked. [00:36:00] It’s truly not something you can put, I couldn’t responsibly ever put it in anybody else’s hands.
Interviewer: Yeah. As you think about your evolution as a writer, you–I wish we had more time to talk about your whole career, but as you think about your career, as varied as it was, how do you think you evolved or improved as a writer?
Grantwriter: I [00:36:30] think I’m developed, again, as I know I’ve stressed this before, but I developed a greater appreciation for the reader. Because that’s the only purpose in my writing was for the reader. So, and everything that I wrote, I measured it against accessibility, interest, et cetera, to [00:37:00] the reader, not to myself. And, and I will tell you, um, a person in this area put out a call for somebody to go over his little book that he’d written and I didn’t see anybody else respond. So I said I would, and I don’t know, I’ve never met him. And he emailed it to me and I, and I did it. And I said that I can give you some editorial ideas if you’re interested. I didn’t–I said, I’m pretty tough. And he said, [00:37:30] yes, he would like them. And he took the first couple that I sent and I haven’t heard from him since. I think, I think he’s angry with me, but I explained to him that I’m an advocate for the reader, that there’s no reason for me to write other than to reach my audience. And I think that if I had to pick one thing, it would be, it’s not to hear the sound of my own voice. And that’s what [00:38:00] most of us writers love the sound of our voices, but it was focus on the reader, focus on the reader.
Interviewer: Right. That’s great. I have just a couple more questions and the second to last one is, um, to what extent did you see writing as valued in the community college, you know, in the, the department that you were working with then? Um, how valued was writing?
Interviewer: [00:38:30] Um, I can’t tell you that writing was valued–it was the results of the writing. The kind of writing that I did. You know, I, and I know that’s typical of colleges in general. The president would put out articles, but he didn’t write them. They came out in his name, but he wasn’t going to bother writing them, you know, other people wrote them. Um, he was too busy, you know, doing other things. [00:39:00] Um, and so I would say I got recognition for my results, not from my writing at the college, but again, it goes back to the reader where I got recognition for my writing was from the Department of Labor, from those people who read my writing.
Interviewer: Right. That makes sense. Yeah. [00:39:30] Um, so how did you define successful writing when you were a student versus successful writing as a grant writer? And would you say that you were a successful grant writer? I can tell what I think the answer is, but..[Laughter]
Grantwriter: Yeah, I mean, I just wrote as that, as I said when we first got acquainted through Patrick, um, is that I had just worked on a, uh, I live in the community [00:40:00] that has our own little lake–a manmade lake–and it’s been around for years, and it needs a lot of assistance now. And it costs money. It’s like people say it is like to have a boat. It’s a hole in the ground that you pour money into, and I, and I just finished writing, um, a grant for this. Now I’ve lost track of your question. I’m sorry.
Interviewer: Oh no, that’s okay. Well, well this, I think you’re answering the second part of it.
Grantwriter: Refresh me on that. The question though, so I can get–
Interviewer: Of course. [00:40:30] How did you define successful writing as a student versus as a grant writer and also would you say you’re a successful workplace writer?
Grantwriter: Okay. Okay. So, um, and as I wrote this, I’m almost 90% sure we’re not going to get the money. Um, but not because of my writing. It just because we’re new to this organization and, and there’s maybe others in greater need and we’re private. I don’t know. But, [00:41:00] but I would say I always felt successful as a grant writer and I was, um, because I was pleased again, I agonized over it, but I was pleased with the result of my agony. Um, uh, and after I retired, Delaware, being a small as it is and everybody knowing everybody, my mother, my daughter’s mother-in-law was good friends with [00:41:30] the college vice president for finance. And he said to her, oh, you’re Janet Edwards is —-your daughter’s married, or your son’s married to Janet Edwards’s daughter, and I know Janet and blah, blah, blah. And he said–the most validation I ever got–he said, we have not had anybody who could replace her. He said she was a worker. We’ve lost so much [00:42:00] after she retired–you know, words to that effect.
Interviewer: What a wonderful compliment. Yeah.
Grantwriter: And yes, and it was wonderful and it was, it was kind of gratifying, almost in a nasty way, [laughter] only because again, when you’re not in the academic side, when you are in the more–I should say practical side, but when you’re in there, you got to earn your own keeps side. You’re looked down upon. There’s a, there’s that class distinction among the real [00:42:30] faculty and the, and the people on continuing ed that don’t have credit courses. So that was kind of a vindication, you know, when, when I heard that. Um, the first part of your question was about–?
Interviewer: Defining success. How would you define successful writing when you were a student versus successful writing as a grant writer.
Grantwriter: Right. Okay. I think defining successful writing as a student is whatever the instructor or teacher said [00:43:00] it was. They gave you a grade. If you got an A, you were a good writer. If you got a C you were not such a good writer. I mean I don’t think it was ever in terms of the work that I did. It was in terms of the grade as we were writing for a grade.
Interviewer: And, and in terms of how that shifted to success as a grant writer, was it–
Grantwriter: When I had a purpose, I had a purpose in writing. [00:43:30] It wasn’t for–it was more tied to a goal other than getting through a course.
Interviewer: And would you judge the success of grant writing purely by whether or not the grant was awarded?
Grantwriter: No, no. Because I guess I don’t think we’re going to get this grant. And I, I think, I think the grant was, was pretty well written. Um, because you, you, you’re not always gonna get it. Um, but I, I think I judged it over the [00:44:00] years, again, by the, the reaction of reader. And the fact that the Department of Labor in particular, um, adjusted their, their RFPs cause they liked how I wrote it. So, I mean, I think that that’s about as much of a compliment as you can get when somebody changes what they’re doing because they like what you’re too.
Interviewer: Absolutely. Absolutely.