Rhetoric and composition postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My degree in English Literature taught me to read closely, but the questions that now interest me most came from watching people struggle to write. For two years I have helped my uncle, who runs a small plumbing business, with his correspondence: quotations, complaint responses, a long dispute with a supplier. He is articulate on the phone and stalls completely on the page. Sitting with him, I began to notice which moves worked. A plain opening sentence stating what he wanted. Dates before explanations. A concession to the other party's position before the request. We were not polishing prose; we were making arguments, and the arrangement mattered as much as the wording. That experience led me from literary criticism towards rhetoric and composition.

My final-year project grew out of the same curiosity. I analysed six local council consultation documents on planning and transport, comparing the language of the summary pages with that of the technical annexes. I looked at how choices such as nominalisation, passive constructions and the framing of options shaped what a reader could reasonably object to. Several documents invited comment while presenting decisions as already settled, largely through tense and modality. The project made me careful about claims: with a small sample I could describe patterns and their likely effects, but not measure reception. I would like to take that limitation seriously in postgraduate work, and to learn methods for studying writing as it is actually produced and read, rather than only as a finished text.

My reading has been independent but sustained. Aristotle's Rhetoric gave me the vocabulary of appeals and of deliberative genres, and I found the discussion of the enthymeme especially useful, because it explains how audiences supply the premises a writer leaves unstated. Reading Peter Elbow on freewriting and Nancy Sommers on revision changed how I work: I now expect early drafts to be exploratory, and I revise at the level of purpose and structure before sentences. I have also been reading about writing centres and about how tutors can respond to a draft without rewriting it for the student, which connects directly to the conversations I have had across my uncle's kitchen table.

My paid work has shaped my interests in less obvious ways. As a library assistant I help readers with forms, applications and the occasional grant bid, and I see how much of everyday literacy is genre knowledge rather than grammar. On reception at a community centre I write notices, minutes and room-booking emails, and I have learned that a notice nobody reads is a failure of composition, not of attention. My hobby is letterpress and zine-making: setting type by hand slows me down and makes layout, spacing and emphasis feel like rhetorical decisions, because they are the first things a reader meets. I have printed short runs for a local poetry night and taught two friends to set a page.

I want postgraduate study to give me a firmer grounding in rhetorical theory beyond the classical canon, including feminist and comparative approaches, and to introduce me to research methods in composition studies such as discourse analysis, interviews with writers and the study of drafts. I would like to develop the council consultation work into a fuller study of how institutions write to the public. Longer term I hope to teach writing, whether in a university writing centre or in adult and community education, and to do so on the basis of evidence about how writing is learned rather than instinct alone. I am ready for a demanding year of reading, and for the discipline of having my own drafts questioned.

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