The statement of purpose in graduate program applications: Genre structure and disciplinary variation

Recent research of student writing has included a few studies of the statement of purpose submitted as part of the admission process to programs of study, which have indicated variations in expectations by disciplinary gatekeepers. These studies indicate a need for further study of statements of purpose submitted to different departments, informed by the views of disciplinary specialists. In this paper, we first report on a survey of print and electronic resources on writing the statement, which revealed that information on writing statements for specific master’s programs is not consistently available. This lends support to the “semi-occluded” status of this genre. We also discuss a genre analysis of successful statements submitted to three master’s programs (Linguistics, Business Administration and Electrical Engineering) at a university in the US, drawing on the views of informants from these departments. Our findings indicate that, although statements from the three disciplines may contain the same rhetorical moves, they differ in the constituent steps used to realize some of the moves. These findings lead to implications not only for EAP instruction but also for master’s programs soliciting statements from prospective graduate students.