Linguistic Analysis of Grant Proposals: European Union Research Grants

Abstract Grant proposals are a genre that all academics will have to come to terms with at some point of their career, usually the sooner the better. Yet, there has been very little research on their characteristic features and they are not included in most courses of academic writing. We seek to remedy some of this problem in this paper, which is based on a sample of 34 proposals from European Union (EU) research grant applications written mainly by Finnish-led research teams. Our approach draws on Swalesian genre analysis as well as a social constructionist theory of genre [ Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995 ]. In our analysis, we identified ten recurrent moves in the proposals, reflecting the generic affinity of grant proposals to both academic research papers ( Swales 1981 and Swales 1990 ) and promotional genres ( Bhatia 1993 ), in addition to moves specific to the grant proposals genre. The results should benefit both genre research and the teaching of academic writing.