doubledogd

If you're not sure where to start, try just freewriting about your research interests. What questions do you want to consider? What time period/specific field? What kind of issues do you want to explore? Are there any texts/critics that you can point to as models for what you want to do? (The concerns from the above prompt.) Don't worry about making it sound good or look organized; just try to articulate your ideas somehow. This is, I think, the core of the SOP. Eventually you'll want to write these ideas out more coherently and connect them to specific programs, but this is a good prewriting exercise. Once you've figured out how to represent your academic interests, you might find it easier to create a narrative about your past experiences and tie it all together. If you've been reading example statements, then you probably already have a sense of how the overall text is structured--the hardest part is figuring out how to get into it. Keep in mind that the most important aspect of a first draft is that it exists (so you have something to revise).

One suggestion I have is to edit out the epigraph and to make your first sentence something like this: I agree wholeheartedly with Jaron Lanier, the pioneer of virtual reality, when he writes, "I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science [finish quotation]." One of my first experiences . . . Maybe exchange "wholeheartedly" with something more your style, but my personal opinion is that a streamlined SOP without an epigraph would look better.

I am not in any way knowledgeable about your field, but my instinct is to recommend tutoring or any kind of teaching/instructing gig. This background can be really useful when applying for TA-ships.

It depends on each school's specific application system, but all of mine have allowed that so far. I would be surprised if you couldn't.

Yeah, as haltheincandescent says, I don't think I was ever given access to my raw score.

I took the subject test in September, and I would definitely say that there was a large number of longer passages and grouped questions that included comprehension and identification. Many of the basic identification questions were theory/criticism-based. A good idea might be to read (or reread) Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: an Introduction. If you haven't already taken all the practice exams you can find, do that and make sure to go through the answers. Try to have a sense of major authors and movements--simply recognizing names and using context clues will take you far. I went in expecting a lot of questions in areas that I felt weak in (ancient Greek, Old English, 18th-century) and definitely saw them there, but I was pleasantly surprised by the relative popularity of modernist and 20th-century authors too. My best piece of (testing) advice is to go ahead and guess whenever you can eliminate at least one of the possibilities. Since a wrong answer is only a 1/4 point off, I took an aggressive approach, left only eight questions blank, and ended up with a strong score.

Scores are up!

Hello all: I'm applying to a bunch of PhD programs in English this season and had a question about the applications. Looking through, most applications seem to ask you to choose a subfield from a drop-down list. My concern is trying to choose between a literary time period (20th-century American, etc.) or the general Critical Theory subfield. Given what I want to study, I could choose either option, but I am wondering what is at stake in the decision. Does this question determine who will look over my application? Is there a smarter or more competitive choice? How does my answer to this subfield question affect the way my application is handled? Thanks in advance for any responses!