I'm pleased to be working on grant applications and ethics applications with my supervisors. I willingly contribute however I can - either they assign me bits to work on, or I suggest how I can help. I'm getting good insights into the process.
However, I get a bit demoralised when I spend a day or more working on a section of the proposal, send it through for them to look at, and then find that not much (none?) of it has made the cut. In one instance, I spent a couple of weeks working on an ethics application but then it was simply rewritten from scratch over a weekend. I realise that there are deadlines, and that I'm new to this, I don't really get the grant application writing game yet, and it could be that my contributions are mostly garbage. But I'd really rather hear that - and know why it's not useful, to be able to learn for next time, than just have it disappear... which is really rather demotivating. Any tips on how I can gently steer my supervisors to either provide me clearer guidelines upfront or take the time to give me feedback on my contributions? Ideally without coming across as difficult / high maintenance.
[I feel like this probably applies to other collaborative writing endeavours, too...]
Background: I'm in the final year of a 3 yr PhD. My supervisors seem happy with my output and contributions to the lab, we generally have a good relationship and they are keen to make a postdoc happen for me here. I'm happy to broach this subject with my supervisors, but am unsure how to do so - partly because I'm not sure whether this is a common issue in academia (I spent 15 years working in corporate environments, generally found that bosses would give me feedback but expect me to implement changes... so this is weird).