Don’ts in Writing your REAP

Bypassing Risk Management

Know what are the target sectors of Australia Awards. Constantly, the Australia Awards
revises the list of their target sectors and discipline that may require more experts. Avoid
proposing projects on disciplines that were not included in their list. Grab the opportunity in
creating a REAP title aligned to the priority list of Australia Awards scholar.

A balance anticipation of the risks that will be involved in your project should always have a
careful Plan B to Z. The risk management also shows that your REAP is more realistic and
attainable.

Applying scholars are all professionals with enough expertise in their field. However, we
critically need to situate ourselves to the assessor’s feelings and perspective when they are
reading your REAP. If we bombard the REAP evaluator with highfalutin words, the content
may give distracting or misleading context. Eventually, the REAP will become less
memorable and less appealing to your assessor.

Your assessors are reading more than thousands of REAP and as an effective writer, you
need to keep your REAP floating in the flood. If you give your reviewers a hard time
understanding your paper, it will not stand out and it will be difficult to communicate your
REAP’s objectives to your reader.

The rule of thumb is to avoid using technical terms when writing your REAP. We need to
keep our paper as edible as possible. Remember that you are not sitting beside your
assessor drinking espresso and explaining how your REAP will be executed. Your REAP
should be able to stand alone and represent you as an applicant. Therefore, your choice of
words is crucial to land your name in the shortlist.

Overall, a REAP with the right hybrid of academic terms and friendly jargon can
communicate effectively to your readers.

For applicants who have little exposure to writing or have not written academic or scholarly
papers, it will be more tedious to relearn the educational format in writing.

In writing, grammar gives weight to represent the reliability of your paper. However, some
applicants with grammatically correct REAPs missed key points to improve your proposal.

As often, write in ‘Active’ voice as this promotes action and movement to your
paper. Check a selection of phrase banks to see the choice of words that best fit in
your context.
Do not use contractions such as ‘Don’t, What’s, and Would’ve’ as these make your
sentences more informal.
o Avoid using ‘A lot, Really, There is/are’ because removing these words can make the
essence of the argument stronger and straightforward.

It is ubiquitously said that we need to keep our REAP SMART. The scholarship believes in our
capabilities but in reality, the goal is to deliver and scale your development programs in a
short period of time
When can we consider as difficult goals?

If you do not have enough funds or immediate connections to run your program,
then it becomes farfetched to your assessor even if your proposal is possible.
If the proposal is not as tangible or visual as your REAP describes, then you may
struggle in relaying to your assessor what you really want to execute. When you say
tangible, it is a project with an output that you can easily be put into words. A
working example would be a business template proposal, a modernised bus stop
blueprint, or a mobile application prototype. By materialising your proposal, it
becomes clearer to your assessor what really is the output of your REAP.
Scaling down your targeted audience or organisation to a more specific
demographics defines a better monitoring. If you consider a small group of
beneficiaries in your closest proximity, the project would be easier to supervise and
observe. Additionally, you can receive quicker feedback and you can write reports to
Australia Awards immediately.

Finally, during your execution, you can always go beyond your REAP program. It does not
mean that you have limited and scoped your content you will go to a pulled-punch. You are
more than welcome to create more REAPs as long as you already finished your proposed
project for Australia Awards.

In all forms of the project proposal, time is both your best friend and worst enemy because
the quality of your project depends on the time invested for research and writing.

In March 2018, a series of focus group discussions for reapplying scholars was conducted to
identify the time spent on applicants to write their REAP. Alarmingly, the average research
and writing days of the reapplying scholars were only 1.2 to 28.6 days compared to the
allotted 90 days of REAP development given by Australia Awards.