Download PDFRhetorical Style in the SP Genre
In the scholarly literature, I was not able to find explicit research on style in the SP genre. However, some popular books and websites provide recipe-type guidance on style so that prospective applicants can write their SPs. For example, Mumby (1962) emphasized “clarity,” “originality,” and “content” (p. 130) in a winning SP. He stated that an SP should contain “affirmative statements” (p. 130) and include only appropriate (relevant) content devoid of controversy and jocularity. Regarding clarity, he mentioned that the SPs should be free of mechanical errors and be perfect grammatically. Stewart (2002) extended this conversation by stating that SPs have a high success rate to the audience when applicants use first person, choose words characteristic of formal writing, avoid discipline-specific jargon and creative writing tactics, apply conventional typefaces and fonts, and adhere to word and page limits in their SPs. Overall, he stated that the applicants should avoid “unconventional” and “gimmicky” writing styles (p. 17).
In her textual analysis of SPs, Ding (2007) considered the lexical strategies taken by applicants. She conducted a genre analysis of SPs (n=30), both edited and unedited, submitted to medical and dental schools. Along with a move analysis, she paid special attention to lexical features (analysis of words) to understand what kinds of words and word structures differentiated the edited and unedited SPs. She used concordance software, Concapp and Concordance, to run frequency word counts on edited and unedited SPs submitted to medical or dental schools in the United States. She found that a higher percentage of binary noun phrases related to medicine- or dentistry-related content was used in the edited SPs, whereas a lower percentage was used in the unedited SPs. More irrelevant content, particularly noun phrases expressing content irrelevant to the medicine or dentistry field, were used in the unedited SPs.
Previous studies indicate a dearth of research in analyzing the SP genre from a stylistic perspective. Mumby (1962) and Stewart (2009) offered some advice regarding style, but that advice is not objective (or perhaps lacks practical application). For example, Mumby (1962) stated that prospective graduate applicants should maintain clarity and originality in their SPs; however, his definition of clarity and originality and their applications in the practical sense are difficult to understand. Also, previous research studies did not thoroughly analyze the SPs graphologically, morphologically, syntactically, semantically, and lexically. The use of pronouns, contractions, sentences, and paragraphs in the SP genre has never been studied, to the best of my knowledge. Therefore, I decided to examine my participants’ use of diction (personal pronouns and contractions), sentences (length and types), and paragraphing (length) in their SPs.