If I asked you to name the single most important part of your graduate statement of purpose, what would you say? Your research experience? Fancy GPA? Most students certainly believe their background credentials are all-important. But this isn’t correct. Not even close. In fact, your background is the least important part of the SOP. If you’ve had a substantial education in writing, rhetoric, and the (lost) art of persuasion, you probably understand why.
Unfortunately, few college students (anywhere in the world) obtain this education anymore. In my opinion, it’s a tragic failure of our public institutions, and this explains why, even today, I constantly encounter the question that saddens me more than any other:
“Why does the Why This Program section come before Why I’m Qualified?”
Despite what the conventional wisdom says, and despite what your intuition might be telling you, there are very good reasons why a good SOP describes your future goals before it ever bothers discussing your past credentials.
Let’s examine three reasons why, and in doing so, begin to understand the Lost Art of Persuasion (and how it can make you maximally competitive in the grad school applicant pile).
1. This is Literally a 4,000-Year Old Strategy
In the 5th century BC, Socrates, the Greek philosopher (and patron saint of all Internet trolls), spent a lot of time complaining about sophists and politicians. The sophists were public teachers of wisdom. The politicians were little different than ours today. According to Socrates, these noble gentleman rarely knew what they were talking about, but they had this maddening ability to persuade everyone who listened to them.
A sophist couldn’t explain what “wisdom” actually was, but he could convince entire cities that he was the only person who could teach them (for a fee) how to be wise. A politician had no clue what was actually best for his city (he usually suggested something that made him rich), but somehow, everyone believed him when he spoke.
This magical power was called rhetoric. The Mesopotamians and Egyptians invented it. The Greek politicians studied it and perfected it. Plato wrote about it in his Gorgias and Phaedrus dialogues, and in his legendary work, Rhetoric, Aristotle summarized the art of persuasion this way:
- Introduce Your Issue
- Present Your Case
- Address The Opposition
- Provide Your Proof
- Present Your Conclusion
Thanks, Aristotle. This does indeed sound like a fine way to make a convincing argument. However, this begs the question: what is the argument of the SOP?
If you’re smart, your SOP will make this singular (and very convincing) argument:
“If you admit me, Dream University, I’ll flourish within your program, prepare to achieve big goals in the future, and thus provide a strong return on your investment of time and resources in me.”
Your Why This Program section is your case (no. 2 above). It shows how you will flourish if they admit you. Your background credentials, however, are only the proof (no. 4) that you’re actually capable of flourishing.
Thus, if you describe your credentials BEFORE your Why This Program section, you’re getting the argument backward. Instead of arguing that you’re a perfect student for this program, one who will flourish, you’re arguing…what? That you’re educated? That you graduated from college? The reader can’t tell the point of your essay because this backward structure makes it appear as if you don’t actually know what you’re arguing.
(In fact, this is probably why you’re visiting this blog right now: you don’t know what you’re supposed to argue.)
Frankly, this isn’t uncommon, and it’s quite a tedious problem for admissions committees. In an essay titled “What’s a Good Statement of Purpose?” one Stanford professor referred to these no-argument essays as “inadvertent disclosures of purposelessness.” He went on to say:
“If you devote the statement to a list of the great things you have done, then you will merely exasperate the reader.”
Ouch. Okay. Point taken. We can safely assume that submitting such an essay is probably not a great way to get admitted. Presenting your case before your proof, however, is not just the natural way to avoid that tragedy, but the most sophisticated—as the Greeks taught us millennia ago.
So, if you STILL want to write your Why I’m Qualified section first…
And if I were feeling really snarky…
I’d have to ask: Do you honestly think Aristotle was wrong?
Are you sure you want to ignore the argument structure that humans figured out three millennia ago? The one that Harvard and Oxford rhetoric professors still teach today? The kind that our Stanford professor above was urging you to write?
If so, well…the Greeks had a word for this too, gentle reader.
They called it hubris.
It meant “dangerous overconfidence” and an “extreme transgression against the gods,” and it always led to a tragic ending.
2. The Modern Art of Persuasion
Today, we have folks who’ve perfected rhetoric and persuasion in a way that would have made Plato shake with fury: advertisers.
Have you ever seen the show Mad Men? There’s one thing that every single one of these ad copywriters knows: if you want to persuade a customer to buy a product, you never explain the features until AFTER you’ve sold the customer emotionally. You do that by allowing the customer to first visualize themselves — in the future — happily using this product which solves their problems.
If you want to persuade them to buy, they first need to see the end result. They need to feel good before you get all logical with the proof of your argument.
You already know this deep in your bones. It’s why every fitness ad on social media begins with Before/After photos. It’s why every health supplement in the world fills their website with “User Generated Content” — bright happy videos with five-star reviews that make you think you TOO will be bright and happy if you buy. They want you to see the end result before they ever bother telling you about the ingredients, or how some (probably imaginary) scientist created their formula.
Aristotle called this “pathos” — an appeal to the audience’s emotions — and it always came BEFORE “ethos,” or an appeal to your own credibility.
Aristotle would have made a great advertising man!
In the case of the SOP, the admissions reader is the customer, and you’re both the salesperson and the product. The customer’s problem is that they need an A+ rock star student who improves the university’s good name. If you want them to choose you as that student, you need to appeal to “pathos” first before you address your own “ethos.”
If you told those advertising professionals today, people who make millions of dollars, that you want to explain your credentials BEFORE you let the “customer” visualize what you’re selling…they’d absolutely laugh in your face. They’d spit up their coffee. They’d wipe their tears with dollar bills. Then, when they finally calmed down, they’d pull out their copy of Rhetoric (yes, they still study it today), look you in the eye, and they’d quote Brad Pitt from Troy:
3. Every Applicant Looks the Same…At First
Among the 30% of applicants actually in consideration for admission — those who are actually qualified — virtually all have similar backgrounds. Similar research, grades, and internships. They all want the same job afterward, and maddeningly, most of them use the same buzz words in their essays (all copied from the department website).
Truthfully, they’re all great students, and all of them could be successful in grad school.
But not all of them get chosen, do they?
When an admissions reader has to slog through 50 of these similar SOPs, they start to look blurry. It’s worse when the essays all start with a general statement of goals and a long list of past credentials. Since every applicant is applying to the same program, everyone has the same goal. To the professors and administrators reading the SOPs, everyone’s first few paragraphs look, sound, and feel the same.
In ultra-competitive grad school admissions, it’s not a great idea to look the same as everyone else. Nor is it particularly useful when a professor skims past your first paragraphs because she already knows what they say.
Is that what we want? To be skimmable? To be a faceless member of the herd? To be the literary equivalent of a “grad student” emoji?
But if one SOP in the pile begins with a short but captivating intellectual story, then introduces a boldly specific Sentence of Purpose, then transitions into a vivid Why This Program section…well now, that’s different, isn’t it?
The reader doesn’t know WHY it’s different (they haven’t read their Aristotle), but they do know that this essay is immediately unique, immediately intelligent, and immediately goal-oriented.
Most importantly, they quickly SEE their problem getting solved. They can SEE you contributing something unique to the program. They can SEE that you’ll be an A+ rock star, the diamond in the rough they’ve been searching for.
Dozens of professors have publicly stated that THIS is the type of essay they prefer. When every other applicant is a bland, faceless list of credentials, they want to read about real students, with real plans, who want to solve real problems.
They honestly do not care about your undergraduate credentials. They’ve seen it a thousand times! They want to know the same thing that every customer who views an advertisement wants to know. The same thing every citizen listening to a politician wants to know:
What can you do for me?
The ancient Greeks and Advertising Men have taught us how to answer this question. So, perhaps our own question shouldn’t be: why does the Why This Program section come first?
Perhaps the real question is…
Why do people recommend listing your credentials first?
If you ever Googled “how to write an SOP,” the first results that pop up are from fine, stalwart universities. They recommend an essay that starts by listing your credentials.
But…look who’s giving you the advice.
Is it a brilliantly persuasive writer? Is it an advertising man or scholar of rhetoric?
Nope. It’s the faceless corp. of the “graduate division,” an army of professional administrators, usually led by one or two professors in the social sciences. (And forgive me for saying this, but honestly, social science professors aren’t exactly renowned for their writing abilities. Their journal publications are rarely paragons of clarity and heart.)
The graduate division employs a specific kind of person who’s had a specific kind of education (one that doesn’t involve persuasive writing). They also have a mandate for the kind of students they want — a list of demographics to meet. So, when these administrators tell students what to write, they’re thinking in terms of pure information. They’re visualizing an info dump.
They know what they want, but they aren’t considering how to teach you to be what they want.
Curiously, however, the graduate division administrative office isn’t the only source for SOP instructions. Google doesn’t show you these results…and AI typically overlooks them unless you know exactly what to ask…but the individual academic departments often give very different instructions. Consider the English Department at Harvard, who tells you to write your SOP this way:
- The Statement of Purpose is not a personal statement and should not be heavily weighted down with autobiographical anecdotes.
No heavy autobiographies! Your past experiences are not what’s most important here. They only want the barest hint of a personal story. (Frame Narrative Introduction!)
- It should be no longer than 1,000 words.
Keep it short and tight!
- It should focus on giving the admissions committee a clear sense of applicants’ individual interests and strengths. Applicants need not indicate a precise field of specialization, if they do not know, but it is helpful to know something about a candidate’s professional aspirations and sense of their own skills, as well as how the Harvard English department might help in attaining their goals.
Why This Program!
- Those who already have a research topic in mind should outline it in detail, giving a sense of how they plan their progress through the program.
Why This Program!
- Those who do not [have a research goal] should at least attempt to define the questions and interests they foresee driving their work over the next few years.
Study Plan! Why This Program!
…and that’s it! Never once do they ask for a list of credentials. Harvard instructs you very clearly. The only want to know:
What can you do for us?
Want More Proof?
Check out this brilliant Reddit AMA from a former admissions committee chair. You’ll find a lot of great advice, but this quotation stands out:
“A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that an SOP is your life history, or what draws you to the field. It’s not. It should be a very clear, very detailed statement of what you plan to do in the degree program, why it’s important, and why you’re qualified to undertake it. I know that sounds simple, but it’s amazing how many people can’t manage it. Why is this program the right program for you? What’s the fit between you and the intellectual resources they offer? Why are you qualified to do what you say you want to do? A really great SOP can do a lot to override poor test scores! Good luck!”
Heed this advice, gentle reader. It’s begging you to use the Lost Art of Persuasion…in the exact same format Aristotle gave us 2,400 years ago! Plus, when a professor and admissions chair tells you this directly, it’s probably a good idea to listen.
A Risky Caveat
Just so there’s no confusion for you, let me say that there’s absolutely no requirement that you follow my structural advice. A good writer can take any structure and turn it into a great essay. That’s the beauty of writing. As I mentioned here, a lot of very smart applicants use WriteIvy’s methodology, but prefer to put their Why This School bit at the end. And they still get amazing admissions. That’s wonderful!
It’s not that I think it’s always best to place Why This School before Why I’m Qualified. It’s that I think it works best AFTER a proper, elegant, well-written Narrative Introduction.
Without the narrative intro…
Or with a poorly written narrative intro…
Or with a very dry and abstracted “statement of objectives”-type intro…
The structure I advise doesn’t work at all.
The narrative introduction first has to establish your authority. It has to (briefly!) show the reader that you’re someone to pay attention to. Read any sample essay on our blog and you’ll find they all do this in the first 2-3 sentences. You know, immediately, that this is a serious applicant.
But, once you’ve established that trust, there’s no reason to talk more about yourself (for the moment). At that point, the reader knows enough to be impressed, and they’re ready to be persuaded.
For example, if your intro mentions that you have a first-author paper in Nature, then it makes ZERO sense to then go backward and talk about your freshman year research. It’s like, huh? Who cares about your freshman year research? Tell us about your Nature research and what you plan to do next!
But, as a counterexample, imagine the intro doesn’t say that you have a first-author paper in Nature. It just begins with a dry, statement of objectives:
“At Harvard, I plan to study the problem of XYZ and how it might lead to 123.”
Now, you MUST go back and talk about your background because you haven’t yet established the reader’s trust. You haven’t impressed them enough yet to make them care about your future plans. You haven’t given them reason to believe that you’ll have intelligent plans at all. So, in this case, you must write Why I’m Qualified first.
Unfortunately, in most cases, this asks a lot of the reader. You’re risking boring them and making them skim, because, as we saw above, every decent applicant’s background profile looks similar. You’re also risking spending half the essay before you earn the reader’s trust. This means they’re more likely to forget or ignore what they’ve read.
Curiously, it’s popular for Computer Science applicants to try to circumvent this by filling their essays with subheaders and bolded text—the parts they want readers to pay attention to. To me, however, this is just an implicit admission that nobody is actually reading the whole essay, that everyone is just skimming.
Who can blame them? With so many “inadvertent disclosures of purposelessness” to read? But even so, if your intro is entirely abstract, or if it doesn’t establish your authority, you must go backward and provide your credentials first.
So, ultimately, this is why I believe that conventionally structured essays aren’t the best option: they ask more of the reader’s attention in an already low-attention situation. They ask readers to skim.
Narrative-based essays, however, when they’re well written, defuse that problem. They quickly capture attention. Then, they quickly nudge the reader toward making a positive (subconscious) decision about you. Everything that comes afterward in the essay is designed to confirm the positive decision they’ve already (subconsciously) made, leaving the reader at essay’s end with a very good feeling about you.
And that feeling usually manifests as a green check mark and an email that begins, “Congratulations!”
Conclusion on the Lost Art of Persuasion
Folks, listen to the English professors at Harvard. Listen to the advertising men and other experts in the Art of Persuasion. Captivate your readers’ hearts and minds.
I wish it were otherwise, but the administrators who ask for lists of credentials aren’t thinking about how to write persuasively. They’re not thinking about what’s best for you—what gives you the greatest competitive advantage.
Of course, if everyone in our universities knew how to write this way, we wouldn’t have an advertising copywriting industry which I once saw described as “a $50 billion industry where you’ll find plenty of work and no competition.” Nor would we have top-5 business schools charging thousands of dollars for sales-writing courses that amount to “Aristotle + AI!”
It’s kind of appalling. Yet at the same time, it’s a glittering opportunity for you.
Follow the timeless rules of rhetoric.
Employ the art of persuasion.
Don’t be a faceless member of the herd.
Be bold. Be unique. Be the diamond in the rough.
Use pathos.
Sell yourself.
Write your Why This Program section first.
