I read what seems to me to be sound advice about preparing one’s statement of purpose for graduate school:

Let’s say you want to be a historian. Sit down and write out two or three sentences describing what kind of historian you want to be.

If what you get out of that exercise is, “I really enjoy the study of history, particularly reading old documents” or even, “I’m fascinated by American history, particularly the Civil War”, do yourself a favor and give up any ambitions to do a doctorate in history. Not because there is anything wrong with either of those statements, but because you don’t have a sufficiently specific sense of what it is presently like to be a professional academic historian. That’s one of the major points of my “Should You Go to Graduate School”: grad school is not an exploratory kind of education. That’s bad, in my view, but that’s the way it is. Period.

If you have to study and read in order to come up with a more specific statement, you may also need to forget about grad school ambitions. To some extent, that statement of interests needs to come to you fairly naturally, as a result of study and thinking you’ve done as an undergraduate. If you dive into historical scholarship looking for a persona you can adopt, and then memorize it like a spy’s cover identity, you’re probably not going to convince anyone. You can hone some of your ideas with reading as you prepare an application, but you need to have some sense of what’s out there beforehand.

. . .

The reason these [examples omitted] are successful beginnings is first, they can communicate clearly to potential advisors that an applicant already has a good sense of what a scholarly historian does and a developed sense of their own intellectual identity. Second, and more importantly, these statements are a guide to where you want to be applying. As you develop a statement like this, it should point the way to programs that have strong support for that kind of study, and even to specific advisors whose professional identity closely matches an applicant’s stated ambitions.

HT: Cliopatria

I think that I passed this test fairly well: I have a specific idea about what I want to study in a PhD program, and I’m studying to make that idea clearer. For now, I won’t post my statement of purpose, but I’m glad that I have one. Beyond that, I’m glad that I have a philosophy behind it explaining why my purpose matters. Now to articulate it.