For NIH applicants ready to revise
An in-depth review that shows you how to make your grant readable AND compelling.
NIHClarity analyzes your draft using both sound rhetorical principles and writing techniques that make your text — including figure captions — immediately understandable, no matter how technical. It improves how the writing conveys the science.
- Built on an in-person 5-week, 10-hour workshop taught for more than a decade at major academic institutions.
- Yes, NIHClarity uses AI — but you draft the grant. We start with your draft. The AI does not write the grant for you. It has been trained on the workshop methods and reviews your submission at lightning speed against those proven principles, returning actionable critiques at the section and sentence level that you can apply immediately.
- What's more, the review maps your text directly against the current published NIH criteria for the key sections — Significance, Innovation, Approach. If your grant doesn't yet demonstrate that alignment, the NIHClarity review shows you exactly how to revise your grant so it does.
The filing drafts you upload for review are NOT retained in any database – they are processed in memory only.
The review output aims to meet the current NIH criteria on the use of AI — namely, to not submit applications “substantially developed by AI” or not have “sections largely generated by AI.” That is why NIHClarity only reviews drafts that you wrote.
What's reviewable today
One section per review, with the right standard for that section.
Aims, Significance, Innovation, and Approach ask different rhetorical questions. NIHClarity treats them differently, and ships them one at a time so each section's review is calibrated before it goes live.
Specific Aims
Funnel, gap, hypothesis, aim logic, independence, feasibility signals, and cognitive load.
Significance
Criteria mapping, importance, knowledge gap, scientific premise, and reviewer-language alignment.
Innovation
Conceptual and technical advance, with criteria-based assessment of what the work actually changes.
Approach
Rigor, feasibility, and rationale, mapped against current NIH Approach criteria.
How a review works
Three steps, one section at a time.
A pass is section-agnostic and grant-agnostic — usable on any section of any grant, anytime within your plan.
Submit one section
Upload the PDF of a single section. Pick the funding mechanism — R01, R15, F31, F32, K, or R21 — so the review uses the right reviewer lens.
The engine maps your argument
NIHClarity analyzes the persuasive architecture of the section, locates each NIH criterion as explicit, implicit, or addressed elsewhere, and identifies sentence-level revisions.
You receive a full review packet
Read the review in-browser. Download a tracked-changes Word doc, a clean revised Word doc in NIH formatting, and two summary slides for collaborators or mentors.
Deliverables
Eight outputs you can work from.
Five components inside the review itself, three files you can hand to a co-investigator or a writing group.
Inside the review
The strengths to protect and the highest-value revision opportunities.
Where each criterion is explicit, implicit, or better addressed in another section.
Section-specific commentary on argument, structure, and reviewer cognitive burden.
Specific suggested changes, each tagged Criteria, Prose, or Criteria + Prose.
A pattern-level account of what the revision work mostly is. Available for Significance and on.
Files you take away
Editable revisions with reviewer-facing comments tagged [CRITERIA] or [PROSE].
The revised section in NIH formatting — 0.5″ margins, Arial 11pt, single-spaced — ready to drop into the submission.
Concise visual summary for a writing group, mentor meeting, or co-investigator review.
Scope
Not a writing chatbot. Not a scientific reviewer.
NIHClarity occupies a narrow seat between the writing coach and the study section: rhetorical review of grant language, evaluated against current NIH criteria.
What it does
- Reviews how the science is presented: argument flow, criteria coverage, and reviewer-facing language.
- Maps your text to the criteria the chosen mechanism is actually reviewed against.
- Distinguishes "not present in this section" from "not addressed" — a criterion met elsewhere is not a criterion missed.
- Returns sentence-level revisions that improve clarity without replacing your voice.
What it does not do
- Judge whether the science is correct, novel, or fundable.
- Replace human scientific review by collaborators, mentors, or study sections.
- Generate new science, rewrite your aims for you, or invent claims you did not make.
- Predict funding outcomes or simulate a score.
The framework
A workshop method, encoded.
The product grows out of more than a decade of teaching grant-writing workshops at major academic institutions, with a focus on how reviewers read argument — not just how applicants describe research.
"The job of an Aims page is to walk the reviewer to the conclusion you already reached — without making them re-derive it."
NIHClarity encodes a specific teaching framework rather than generic grant advice. For each section it identifies the rhetorical job, maps the applicant's language to reviewer criteria, distinguishes structure from logic, and proposes revisions that strengthen the case without damaging what already works.
The aim is fair critique. If a criterion is met in another section, the review does not punish the applicant for failing to repeat it. If the intellectual work is present but hidden from reviewers, the review shows where to surface it.
How it was developed
Built by testing the framework against real grant writing.
An iterative process: teaching materials became review criteria, funded examples exposed where the rules were too rigid, and expert correction refined the judgment behind each section.
Start with the workshop method
The review engine begins with the rhetorical framework Karl Keller teaches: how reviewers follow a claim, find the gap, evaluate aims, and recognize whether NIH criteria have been addressed.
Calibrate against funded examples
The framework was tested against real NIH sections, including structurally non-standard ones. The goal was not to enforce a template, but to learn when a section's logic holds even if the writer organizes it differently.
Turn critique into usable revision
Output is shaped for revision, not commentary: identify what already works, surface criteria that are only implicit, and improve sentences without replacing the applicant's scientific argument or voice.
Privacy
Designed for unpublished research.
NIHClarity is stateless by design. The launch architecture does not retain the documents you upload.
What the no-storage promise actually means
Your PDF is processed in memory for the duration of the review session. After the review packet is generated and delivered, the document is not retained on disk and is not added to any document repository. Anonymous usage analytics may be collected, but the scientific text itself is not stored.
This commitment is encoded in the terms of service, not just the interface. It is a structural choice, not a setting.
- In-memory processing. Documents live only for the session that uses them.
- No document repository. Uploaded text is not added to any persisted store.
- Fair critique rule. A criterion met elsewhere is not flagged as missing — it is flagged as "not present in this section."
Pricing
Priced as expert review, not as a writing toy.
Draft pricing shown for positioning during beta. Final launch prices may change. One pass equals one section.
Single Review
$199 / one pass
One section before a deadline.
- One section, any mechanism
- All eight deliverables
- Word + slide downloads
Three-Pack
$499 / three passes
A revise-and-resubmit cycle, or several sections from one grant.
- Three section-agnostic passes
- Use across any sections of any grant
- No expiration during beta
Annual Unlimited
$1,299 / year
Applicants with multiple submissions or repeated revision cycles.
- Unlimited section reviews for one year
- Single named user — not transferable
- Priority access as new sections ship
Department License
Custom / contact
Research-development offices, programs, departments, and training grants.
- Seat-based, billed annually
- Onboarding for grants administrators
- Volume terms by faculty headcount
Beta note: while only the Specific Aims section is live, all plans reflect a single live module. Pricing will be reassessed as Significance, Innovation, and Approach ship.
Review your Specific Aims while the section is in beta.
Upload one Aims PDF, pick the mechanism, and receive a full rhetorical review — narrative, tables, tracked changes, clean revised draft, and slides — in a single pass.