Letters of support: How to go about getting one

Part one of two about an annoying—but necessary—section of grant applications

To whom it may concern,

It gives me great pleasure to write this article in support of letters of support. Actually…no, it doesn’t. Letters of support can be a lot of work for very little utility, and they probably have one of the worst time-spent-writing to time-spent-being-read ratios of any section of a grant application. If it was up to me, I’d throw (almost) all of them on the bonfire of research bureaucracy reduction.