AIATSIS Research
Research grants
Resources
Public programs
Plain English template for grant applications
No two research projects are the same, and there can be several ways of explaining what a project is designed to do and how it will be carried out. Nonetheless, this Template is designed to prompt you into including in your Plain English Research Statement important information about your project.
This includes information which may be obvious to you but less obvious to the research subjects or participants.
A Plain English Research Statement need not be provided in writing – you could explain your project by making a short video about it to show to research subjects or participants.
The plain English Research Statement must be distributed to any research subjects or participants, and can be used more widely for community information purposes.
From the AIATSIS Ethics Committee’s point of view, it is important that making the Statement is recorded in some way, for example has been acknowledged by the participants on the informed consent form.
How to use the template
The Template is not a pro forma. While you will definitely need to put some statements from the template – eg about who the researchers are – into your Plain English Research Statement, other statements are options which will be appropriate to some projects but not others.
You should change the English in this Template, or translate it into indigenous languages, to suit your audience. The Template is written in simple English, because many indigenous Australians have limited education in formal, complex English, and it can be easy for researchers to underestimate the gap between this level of formal education and their own level of education in English.
For people with limited formal education, complex written English may be even more difficult to understand than complex spoken English. If your audience has a higher level of English education than that used in the template, you should use more complex English to avoid insulting them. But it is worth keeping in mind that the kind of plain English used here is now widely used in other contexts for general audiences – eg in Centrelink forms and on bank credit applications.
In the template you will find text highlighted in grey. This is where you will need to insert your own information. Note that there are numerous instances where you will need to indicate either 'I' or 'We', 'and' / 'or. These are indicated in blue. Yellow highlighted text is information for you and can be deleted from your proposal.
Download the Plain English template here.