phd application writing sample

phd application writing sample

Crafting a Compelling PhD Application Writing Sample

1. Introduction to PhD Application Writing Samples

Don’t delude yourself that a particular writing sample is expressing your true scholarly voice… it’s not. That writing is an expression of what you can produce when you have appropriate guidance, supervision, and fit. The sample must give its readers confidence that you are equipped academically and intellectually to complete it. The obvious question is a very important one: if you are ‘tailoring’ your writing sample and your application to the supervisor, the department, and your area… then what can you sample to write about? The simple answer is that you should be drawing on your wider research interests and your existing academic work, whether it is closely related or not. Although it is strongly recommended that your sample be close to your proposed PhD research, if it is too close, it gives rise to the risk of cutting too much of the work you’re about to propose.

When you are applying for a PhD, you will often need to provide a writing sample with your application. This is different from the approach you would take if asked to interview for a PhD or to give a portfolio of your work as part of your application. Rather than simply submitting the most impressive thing you have ever written or several individual chapters from previous work, a good application writing sample needs to be carefully crafted. Its purpose is to persuade. It should convince the reader, who will be an academic in the field, that you have the ability to do advanced research, contribute to knowledge, and write at a standard that is capable of being published.

2. Key Components of an Effective Writing Sample

The reader is given a beacon to mark the important parts of the developing argument. Together, clarity and organization help both the reader and the mechanical functions of the writer’s cognitive architecture to help track the essay does not fall off line. Writing in a sophisticated way primes one’s own thinking to produce sophisticated products. Clear writing leads to clarity in thinking. The statement is simple, but the processes and products are subtle. The diverse forms of thought organization and clarification writing discussed by this section should be considered intellectual performance-enhancing aids. We advocate specific practices not only because taking general principles seriously leads to good consequences, but also because using these practices helps to form the kind of thinking processes that will be evaluated by selection committees. These processes are internalized through practice, and they build as writing becomes easier.

Clearly, organization – starting with good writing – is halfway there. Writers organize their thinking in multiple ways: starting with an overarching point or argument about which subsequent points build; creating lists to show sequence or category membership; creating paragraph sub-goals as part of a hierarchy of major points; applying outline logic that lists signals to show important implications for the main point. The overarching organizing logic is the frame that gives the reader a template to use as the writer develops her argument. In large academic essays, the cover page title, the introduction, and chapter or section titles label major points and serve as organizational signals. In small academic essays, title clarity, a focused introduction, opening roadmaps, value propositions in each paragraph, and an integrated conclusion provide structure.

3. Strategies for Showcasing Research Potential

By enhancing the processes already employed within digital curation, data repository management, and the emerging best practices in personal wealth curate, researchers can afford themselves better research showcasing and scholarship. Sharing data and results in such a way is an important part of a full research CV. Streaming research publications on a personal website is perhaps the simplest of personal wealth management, but in most cases, it is only institutional architecture or project websites that perform this function. Gradual memesis hindrances lie in the near identical appearance of event listings and publication listings on most researchers’ webpages.

The top medium method is the way researchers currently most predominantly communicate their research: expressed through articles, annual convention paper presentations. Many personal websites have moved beyond being a simple events calendar or CV repository to include research in full-text digital version, but only a minority of all writing samples are shareable in this way. Utilizing the principles of parsimony and social media, publications are streamed and shared from subscription databases or remain behind paywalls depending on the extraction service subscribed to by the home university.

4. Common Mistakes to Avoid in Writing Samples

Avoid interpreting research directions and instructions as tailored for others. The goal is to contribute to your future intellectual community. Stated differently, read your writing sample instructions critically. Review the provided writing sample guidelines and choose a piece that best reflects your scholarly strengths. Many haven’t completed published sole-authored work or judge the quality of a writing sample based on if an article was published. This is another unhelpful misconception—applications readers are interested in your scholarly potential, not your publication history. Make the best of what you have.

Avoid failing to fully understand what the writing sample reveals about you as a scholar. Your PhD goals are distinct from your research interests. For a PhD application, your target department is typically assembling a class with diverse research interests. It might cause departments some concern if you describe all the nuanced areas of an article needing to be developed as a broader claim about your inexperience or lack of expertise, particularly regarding how you benefit and contribute to their program or approach.

Avoid presenting non-peer-reviewed work or an unpublished chapter from your MA thesis. Choose an article that you developed and refined for a particular readership. Propose an introduction and conclusion that provide a critical perspective on the methodologies used, the implications of the findings, and the limitations of the research. Try different detailed ways of representing your source data in tables and figures. One mistake is converting every construct you’ve created from interview data into a table, which can lead to numerous tables and an illegible writing sample. If you’re interested in using this writing sample for your dissertation, that’s okay—but to make it an effective writing sample, revamp it to address these considerations.

5. Conclusion and Final Tips for Success

Finally, not all writing samples are created equal. A tenured R1 department hiring an economic historian will weigh the quality of the writing sample more heavily than an LAC department hiring a historian with a regional, thematic, and/or other field distinction; an R1 political science department hiring primarily research faculty weighs publications and/or diss chapter submissions more heavily than a liberal arts institution teaching faculty hiring only its second political scientist, and so forth. Always be mindful of the kinds of departments to which you are applying.

Writing an excellent writing sample is a process that ideally all students should be involved with during their graduate study, not something that is the last thing they do before applying for a job. By consistently producing sections of potential papers, diss chapters, or even whole papers that are presented at conferences, students learn the craft of doing what we do: teaching and engaging an audience by telling a compelling story. So even if you are not currently applying for a job or program, if you need to write a paragraph or two summarizing telling the people around you what you are doing, always have this audience in mind.