Research Proposal and Synopsis

[soumen kayal]

Research proposal and Synopsis are same or not?

[Jasimudeen.s]

:)

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear Sri Saumen Kayal:

Thanks for your post. Research Proposal and Synopsis are sometimes synonymous but often deviates according to the purpose &/or requirements.

I understand that the sentence I have written above may seem somewhat complex and confusing but in case you analyse each word, you may unearth the intrinsic meaning.

 Let me clarify the issue:

Say you are writing a research proposal for doing academic research (like M.Phil/Ph.D.) here you have to  give a title, then start with a short discussion of the problem and feasibility of  the work. Next comes the materials and methods, like how to do the work, what ingredients are required and how to proceed with it etc. Next are observations, results, discussion and references/notes and wrap up; that's all!!

Now  suppose, you are sending a Research Proposal to a funding agency for a Research Project. Here the write up for the research proposal will certainly differ  from the earlier one. Because here you will need to highlight the financial aspects and justifications in the light of feasibility of the work.The nuances of this exercise makes it drastically different than just writing a synopsis of a Thesis or Dissertation!! And it requires an extremely important criteria from the part of the grant seeker. Because the art of writing (of a Research Proposal) is an extremely important and specialised characteristics of the grant seekers and some have it and some don't!! In case you are familiar with research activities, you might be knowing that rejection and acceptance of research grants often depends upon this art of writing !!

A Synopsis, on the other hand, is a "gist" of the entire work. Synopses are often written after completion of the entire work (like, in a theses or dissertation, you may find after the proverbial Introduction a chapter called synopsis of the work!)  While a Research proposal is written in advance, that is, before proceeding to undertake the work. And quite importantly approval of the research work (be it an academic or fund seeking) greatly depends upon how convincingly the proposal is written!!

Again,  for academic research, the researchers are often asked to Submit a Research Proposal OR Synopsis of the study. Here, both are synonymous or Nearly synonymous. As such, at times, they mean almost same things and at times they differ to a considerable extent!!

I hope I could explain it in this brief discourse.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta