Replacement for "narrowly missed?"
I am trying to remove adverbs from my writing.
My grant proposal narrowly missed the funding threshold.
I want to replace the phrase "narrowly missed" or change the whole sentence but still imply how close I was.
Solution 1:
I think that undershoot may be a useful expression in your contest.
Literally (from TFD)
- to shoot short of or below (a target)
It is also often in a figurative sense especially in a financial context.
to fail to achieve a particular result: undershoot sth by sth
- The finance minister undershot his forecast by €3 billion.
(from dictionary.cambridge.org)
The idea is that of missing a possible target. You need an adverb to define the magnitude, but I think the expression conveys the idea effectively.
Solution 2:
You could say:
My grant proposal fell [just] short of the funding threshold.
Note that in this context, the word 'just' (enclosed by square brackets above) is an adverb. I have included it in the alternative wording because it contributes to the sense of nearly-but-not-quite, but you can omit it if you are determined to exclude adverbs.
You could also reword the sentence to give it a positive sense instead:
My grant proposal almost reached / almost achieved the funding threshold.
'Almost' is an adverb too, but I suspect that many people would not recognize it as such because it doesn't end in the -ly that is typical of so many adverbs.
The shortcomings of my wordings reflect a fundamental difficulty with what you are trying to do. This is that English relies quite heavily on modifying verbs with adverbs in order to generate different degrees of emphasis and shades of meaning — something that many other languages achieve by attaching different prefixes and/or suffixes to the verb stem.
Edit
The OP has now changed the wording of the question to accept complete rewrites of the sentence. In which case, something along the lines of
My grant proposal missed the funding threshold by a narrow margin / by a small amount
should do the job.