ERC's €838M, writing towards a reader, and the retreat

Welcome back. Three things this week: an ERC data point that says something surprising about where the world's senior researchers now want to work, an idea about how to write towards a reader rather than around a topic, and a genuine last-call for the writing retreat this Thursday and Friday.

01 · In the field: Europe is becoming the destination of choice for senior researchers

There's a striking figure buried in the ERC's latest Advanced Grants results — the flagship scheme for established scholars — and it's the kind of thing that reframes how you might think about your next career move. Times Higher Education reported that applications from researchers based outside the EU jumped from 44 the previous year to 164 in the latest round, and the number of winners based outside Europe rose from 4 to 13. Of those 13, nine are currently based in the United States. Overall, the 2025 competition awarded €838 million to 319 senior researchers of 33 different nationalities, with the United Kingdom the top host destination (62 projects), followed by Germany (46), Switzerland (32), Spain (29) and France (26).

The mechanism driving the change is the Commission's Choose Europe for Science initiative, which now lets researchers relocating from outside the EU request up to an additional €2 million on top of their Advanced Grant to set up a new lab or research team here. Seven of the 13 non-EU winners took advantage of that provision. As ERC president Maria Leptin put it, the awardees "are of 33 different nationalities — testament to Europe's strength as a destination for outstanding scientific talent, regardless of origin. We need to step up investment for Europe to lead in science and innovation."

Why this matters: the same relocation provision applies to Advanced, Consolidator and Starting Grants — so if you're currently based outside Europe (or working with someone who is), that additional €2 million for setting up here is a real  gamechanger. And if you're already in Europe, the surge in applications is worth noting: this scheme is getting more competitive year on year, and the overall success rate is now 9.6%. If a big application is on your horizon, you need to act quickly before these schemes get even more competitive. 

02 · On the craft: Write for a reader, not around a topic

Here's a small shift that changes almost everything about a stuck draft. When my clients tell me they've been "working on the chapter" or "trying to write the paper" for weeks and it isn't cohering, nine times out of ten the underlying problem is the same: they are writing around a topic instead of towards a reader.

The difference sounds subtle. It isn't. When you write around a topic — colonial-era archives, precarity in the neoliberal university, the reception of Kant in late nineteenth-century Persia — you gather everything you know that touches the subject, arrange it in some plausible order, and hope some kind of structure will reveal itself. It usually doesn't. What emerges is a paper that reads as if the reader is meant to already care, already know the field, already understand why any of this is worth to be explained across 8,000 words. Writing towards a reader is a different orientation entirely. You imagine one specific person you respect — an editor, a supervisor, a smart friend in another subfield — and you write as if you're trying to change what they think about something. Not inform them. Not summarise a debate for them. Change their mind, or sharpen it.

The test I use with my coaching clients is one question: what does the reader believe before they read this, and what should they believe after? If you can't answer both halves in one sentence each, you're writing around a topic. And that is a fixable problem — but you fix it by putting the word doc aside and sitting with your argument and intervention first. I find this piece of thinking almost impossible to do in a fragmented afternoon; it needs a real block of protected time, ideally when your mind is still fresh. Which is why I am running writing retreats that give you those extended blocks of time to solve the real, underlying problems in your writing with my help and support. 

Try this week:

1. Take the paper or chapter you're currently stuck on. Don't open the document.

2. Write two sentences by hand: Before reading this, my reader believes X. After reading this, my reader should believe Y.

3. If X and Y are the same sentence with slightly different words, you have a problem. Your job for the next writing session isn't to add new stuff - it's to identify which gap you're closing and what intervention you want to make. 

03 · Last call: two days of protected writing this Thursday and Friday

This is the last time I'll mention it in the newsletter. My two-day online writing retreat runs this Thursday and Friday, 13–14 August — nine hours of protected writing across the two days, plus speed networking, buddy feedback and a mindset session designed for exactly the kind of project you were just thinking about in Section 2.

If you've been circling the idea, this is the moment. Two full days built for academic writers, fully online so you can join from wherever you are, with real people in the room doing the same thing. Sign up here — and if the dates don't work, just grab my free guide How to Create Your Own One-Day Writing Retreat as a thank-you, with a realistic hour-by-hour schedule and the templates I use with my clients.

Sign up for the retreat here

Or grab the free retreat template here

That's it for today. If one paragraph here made you rethink something, hit reply and tell me — I read every response.

Warmly,
Melanie Sindelar
Founder, EMERGE Scholars Collective