proposal writing; grant writing; academia; how to; steps to writing a research proposal; research design

I'm back to working on my class on Experimental Design and Data Analysis. One of my goals for the course is to have students work in groups to write an NSF-style proposal. So I sat down this morning to think about the steps it takes to write a research proposal. When I turned to google, I found a lot of tips on the writing of proposals, but not a lot of tips about how to actually generate the content that goes into the proposals. Since my course focus is how-to-do-science, I'm more interested in the content than the style. (Yes, I'm sure style can make or break a borderline proposal, but if…