Universities and research institutes depend on clear, compelling
writing to secure grants and publish research. They also should
be helping graduate students to overcome the difficulties of
scientific writing. Gopen’s Reader Expectation Approach (REA)
— credited for transforming scientific writing — has been proven
to help researchers, faculty, post-docs, and students produce
prose that reviewers can follow without struggle, even when the
ideas are complex and the writing is technically dense. Gopen is
the first to discover how readers of English go about the tasks of
reading and interpreting. When writers understand how readers
actually process the information in a sentence (or in a
paragraph), the writers can shape drafts that survive peer
review and succeed in competition.

This page is for deans, research office leaders, center directors, and graduate program heads, who want a proven approach to elevate research and grant writing across their institution. If you are responsible for a campus-wide writing initiative, a graduate seminar series, or a competitive grant cohort, and need a repeatable framework rather than a one‑time inspirational talk, REA training is designed for you. Examples of institutions that would benefit from REA training. include:

• Universities seeking to increase external grant funding.
• Graduate schools improving dissertation, article, and thesis writing.
• Research offices reducing rewriting cycles with PIs

Problems Faced by Institutions

Most universities and research institutions are filled with
excellent scientists who still struggle to get funded or published.
Their proposals and papers often fail because although all the
important information is included in the document, it is not
located, sentence by sentence, in the places readers tend to
look for it. Although the ideas may be potentially strong, they
are not easy to perceive by readers. Gopen’s REA teaches
where in the structure of the English sentence readers tend to
look for the arrival of different kinds of crucial information. REA
also deals with the reader expectations for the English
paragraph. In school, students become (correctly)
convinced that as long as important information is included
somewhere on the page, they will get credit from the teacher for
having found and reported it. In the real world of scientific
writing, the judges of prose are looking not for individual pieces
of information but rather for the way the information is formed into ideas. The more complicated the ideas, the easier it is for
them to get lost on the page, if crucial pieces of information are
not located in the structural locations in which readers seek to
find them. Gopen’s REA equips scientific writers with this
knowledge of how readers go about reading. Experience has
proven that reader-based prose succeeds in competition with
the normal accumulation of information method.

How REA Benefits Institutions

REA training focuses on how readers have been taught to look for context and meaning on the page. Instead of tips or rules, REA participants learn how a reader’s expectations about topic, stress, and sentence structure govern what is noticed, remembered, and believed. Once research faculty and students see how their sentences are actually being read, they can revise drafts in ways that reliably increase clarity, emphasis, and persuasiveness producing:

• Grant applications that reviewers can navigate quickly and accurately.
• Research papers whose arguments remain intact from first draft to final publication.
• Frameworks for discussing drafts across departments.

Can you afford to be misunderstood?

If you are planning your next grant-writing cohort, faculty retreat, or graduate seminar series, this is the moment to build Reader Expectation into the design. A brief conversation can determine which mix of seminar, workshop, and eLearning lectures would best serve your campus. Use the button below to request a complimentary 20-minute discovery call to explore options suitable for your program goals and timelines.