Lay summaries are descriptions of your work written in plain English. These are important as they explain your research to people outside of your field of expertise.
This includes lay members of our Research Review Panel who help to decide which project applications are awarded funding.
A good lay summary will include:
- Lay title
- Brief background or context to your research, including a description of the unmet need(s) that your research will address
- The aim of your project
- How you’ll do your research
- The impact of your project – what might your results mean for people with lung conditions?
Our grant application form asks for these points to be condensed into three sections; lay title, study focus, and summary of potential impact.
Language
Your writing should be simple and direct. Keep sentences short and to the point. Avoid technical or scientific terms (where possible, where not define them in simple language). Don’t use acronyms or jargon and try not to use normalisations – ‘utilisation’ could be better written as ‘using’. Essentially, try to write as you would speak.