Genre analysis of personal statements: Analysis of moves in application essays to medical and dental schools

Despite the important role the personal statement plays in the graduate school application processes, little research has been done on its functional features and little instruction has been given about it in academic writing courses. The author conducted a multi-level discourse analysis on a corpus of 30 medical/dental school application letters, using both a hand-tagged move analysis and a computerized analysis of lexical features of texts. Five recurrent moves were identified, namely, explaining the reason to pursue the proposed study, establishing credentials related to the fields of medicine/dentistry, discussing relevant life experience, stating future career goals, and describing personality.