Exercises — Chapter 34: Capstone — Your Complete Proposal

The capstone's exercises are the capstone itself: finishing your real proposal. Work them with your actual progressive project, so you end with a complete, reviewed, submission-ready proposal.

How to use these: Part A checks recall; Part B applies the capstone skills; Part C is the capstone — assembling, reviewing, and finalizing your proposal; Part M interleaves earlier chapters. Answers to selected exercises (★) are in the back matter.

Part A — Recall and Understand

A1. ★ State the capstone's threshold concept in your own words. Why is reviewing your own proposal as a reviewer the last and best revision?

A2. Why is a proposal with strong individual components not yet fundable? What three things must the capstone add?

A3. What's the difference between a superficial self-review (proofreading) and the reviewer's-eye self-review?

A4. ★ What is a mock review panel, and what makes one effective?

A5. Define: mock review, review criteria/rubric, red-team, compliance pass, polish, submission readiness.

A6. What are the three revision passes, in order, and why that order?

A7. Why does the reviewer's-eye skill make you a permanently better grant writer?

Part B — Apply

B1. ★ Author or reviewer? For each behavior, say whether it's the author's instinct or the reviewer's discipline, and why the reviewer's is what the capstone requires: - (a) Reading the intended meaning into a gap on the page. - (b) Scoring each criterion critically against the rubric. - (c) Assuming a claim is convincing because you know it's true. - (d) Looking for reasons to reject the proposal.

B2. Diagnose the skip. An applicant goes from complete draft straight to submit. What weaknesses survive, and what should they have done?

B3. ★ Run the mock panel right. A grant writer organizes a mock review with friends who say "looks great." What's wrong, and how should the mock panel be run instead?

B4. Order the passes. A writer polishes the prose first, then does the substantive revision. Why is this backwards, and what's the right order?

B5. Know when to stop. A perfectionist keeps polishing past submission readiness, risking the deadline. Make the case for submitting a "done well" proposal on time.

Part C — The Capstone (Complete Your Proposal)

C1. ★ Assemble your complete package. Bring together every component from your progressive project (aims/summary, needs, approach, evaluation/logic model, budget+justification, capacity, sustainability, letters, funder-specific components), in the funder's order and format. Run the Section 34.3 assembly checklist — and check coherence: does every component bind to the aims? Does the budget match the narrative? Does the evaluation measure the promised outcomes?

C2. Conduct the reviewer's-eye self-review. Set the proposal aside a day, then read it as the reviewer, against the funder's actual review criteria. Score yourself honestly, criterion by criterion. List every weakness you'd score down — your revision list.

C3. ★ Get critical external review. Exchange with a colleague (or recruit a mentor/grants-office reader) for a genuinely critical peer review against the criteria — and organize a mock review panel if you can (Section 34.5, "Going Deeper"). Capture the specific weaknesses and suggested fixes.

C4. Execute the three-pass revision. (a) Substantive revision: address what the self-review and external review found. (b) Compliance pass: run the pre-submission checklist (Ch 15/32). (c) Polish pass: one clear voice, unmistakable significance and approach, easy-to-find evidence.

C5. ★ Reach submission readiness. Run the final readiness check (Section 34.7). Confirm the proposal is complete, coherent, compliant, reviewed, revised, and polished. You now have a real, fundable, submission-ready proposal — the proof of the whole book. Save it in your "My Proposal" workspace (and submit it, if it's real and timely).

Part M — Mixed and Interleaved Review

M1. ★ (Ch 22 + 34) How does the reviewer's-eye self-review relate to the re-review psychology of the resubmission?

M2. (Ch 5 + 34) Why is assembling components into one coherent argument (not stacking) essential, per the one-argument principle?

M3. ★ (Ch 15 + 34) Why does the capstone include a final compliance pass, and what does it prevent?

M4. (Ch 19 + 34) How does writing to (and self-scoring against) the published rubric carry into the capstone self-review?

M5. (Ch 32 + 34) How does the toolkit's pre-submission checklist serve the capstone's compliance pass?

M6. (Ch 33 + 34) How is the finished capstone proposal one node in the funding pipeline of Chapter 33?

🪞 Metacognitive check-in. As you did the capstone self-review, how hard was it to genuinely become the critical reviewer of your own work — to set aside what you meant and read as a skeptical stranger? If it felt too comfortable, you were probably still reading as the author. The discomfort of critically reviewing your own proposal is the price of the last and best revision — and the skill, once learned, makes every future proposal better. Did you find real weaknesses? If not, push harder.