As I write this, it is two years to the week since I began working on my statement of proposed study for a U.S. student Fulbright application. Now in my last weeks as a Fulbright Fellow in Croatia, I am amazed that I made it here in the first place because when I started, I had no idea how hard it would be to explain my ideas to the world outside of my home academic department.

When I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship I was three years into a Ph.D. program at Ohio State University, studying linguistics and Slavic languages. I wanted to collect my dissertation data in Croatia and to improve my Croatian skills both for my own benefit and for when I (eventually) go on the academic job market. A Fulbright grant seemed perfect.

I spent one month deciding what, exactly, it was that I wanted to do, should I be so lucky as to receive a Fulbright. This involved the normal process of talking to professors in my field, reading endless piles of literature and, of course, trying to make contacts in the country I was applying to. Finally, after four drafts, I had a plan. It was all clear in my head. I still had no idea whether I would be offered a grant but my advisor was excited, my recommenders were excited, and I was excited. I thought that my proposal was as good as it was going to get.

And then came the interview.

When you first submit a Fulbright application at Ohio State it is, more than anything, a draft. After your interview the Fulbright coordinator allows you to revise anything and everything that you have written, and in fact it encourages you to do so based upon the comments of your interviewers and a mentor that is assigned to work with you. Without that opportunity I would probably not be sitting in Croatia today, because it quickly became clear that my proposed plan of study was a disaster. Nobody except my advisor, my recommenders and me understood what I was talking about. Few people have ever taken a linguistics course, and even fewer have any understanding of what linguists study and why. So when I went into the interview, I was faced with one linguist, one Slavicist, and four people whose specialties were in sociology, history and the like. And clearly, they didnít get it. They had only the most vague idea of what I was talking about.

So why did I get the grant? Because there was that moment when the light bulb went on. I remember it very clearly. I was trying to explain how the study of paradigmatic gaps which arise under conditions of dialect contact in morphologically complex languages are revealing of how languages change and the universal (or, as I was trying to argue, the non-universal) structure of language. I probably stated my point in almost exactly these terms. And I received confused stares. And then I tried an example.

ìConsider the verb to grandstand. People who know this word in its meaning of ëto show offí will readily accept and use forms of this word such as He likes to grandstand or She always grandstands, or He will grandstand at the slightest chance. But what about the past tense? Should it be grandstood? Or grandstanded? For many native speakers of English (and thankfully also for my interviewers!), neither form sounds natural. If the past tense of this verb is necessary, speakers will often avoid the issue by saying, for example, She was grandstanding or He used to grandstand. Thus, although we would expect the existence of a simple past tense form (after all, it is perfectly possible to grandstand in the past), many people donít actually use such a form. This is a paradigmatic gap. This is something that, according to current mainstream linguistic theory, shouldnít happen. I think that Croatia is the place to demonstrate that this happens quite frequently. And hereís why...î

The light bulb went on over the heads of the sociologists and historians. The lesson? Examples are golden. Although intelligent people will be reading your proposed plan of study, few (if any) will be specialists in your field. Furthermore, the longer you spend in a field, the less you realize when you are using technical terms. Thus, the non-linguists saved my linguistics application. The example immediately went into my written proposal. My assigned mentor took my proposal, underlined everything she didnít understand and made me do it again. And again. And then I sent my proposal to my parents, who are also not linguists. And I wrote it again. And yes, again. Each time I clarified the ideas while reducing the terminology.

The result? Ten months later when I arrived at Fulbright orientation in Washington D.C., one of the people who had read my application (head of exchange programs at what was then called the Croatian Ministry of Science and Technology) was able to intelligently explain my proposal to her boss based solely upon what I had written.

That is the goal.

And I will never again write a grant application without passing it in front of as many non-specialist eyes as are willing to read it.