5.5. Drafting

After you’ve outlined, you’re likely ready to take your brainstorming, integrate the ideas into your outline, and start expanding your initial ideas. The brainstorming, outlining, and drafting stages do not necessarily need to be linear, and they can be iterative. How you approach this early part of the writing process should depend on what works for you and moves you from ideas to a final product.

Importantly, when you start drafting the SoP, I recommend first developing one SoP for one specific program. If you try to write a general SoP for all your schools, your argument often gets lost, and you’ll still have to revise it later for each program. It often is easier to start with the longer SoP and then work to be more concise in a following draft for a different program.

Whether you’ve engaged in outlining or not, there are many different drafting strategies that you can try. Here are a couple of suggestions (all of which encourage you to consider making incremental progress):

1. Take one idea and try to write one paragraph about that idea (whether it’s about your experiences, motivation, or fit to program). You might find that you ended up writing about two different experiences that need to be in different paragraphs, but the goal here is to get ideas from your brain onto paper.
2. If you have crafted a detailed outline, take one section of your outline and write more about one specific part. For example, if you’re writing about your experiences, make sure to address the “what” of the experience before intentionally moving into the “so what”.
3. One drafting technique is to set a timer for approximately 5 minutes and write (or type) continuously for that time. Don’t stop writing during the entire time. Of course, everything you write might not be relevant, but forcing yourself to stay focused for a short amount of time can help, especially if you’re experiencing writer’s block.
4. Consider writing one paragraph per day to make meaningful, incremental progress. As you’re writing, make notes to yourself about ideas, sentences, and/or words that you’re finding challenging or that you want to come back and explore later.

Don’t try to start writing your draft by writing the first paragraph. Introduction paragraphs are notoriously challenging – how do you know how you want to frame your statement if you haven’t finalized the statement yet? At this point, you might have some ideas about what you want to say, but it might also make more sense to put this aside and come back to it after you’ve written the body paragraphs.

This might also be the stage in the process where you realize that you need to cut content or you need to elaborate. If you are worried about going over the word limit, I suggest that you not censor yourself at first – get all the ideas down, explore those ideas fully, and then determine how and where you can be more concise or if there is content that can be removed. Remember that you’ll provide your CV/resume with your application materials, so readers can always get more information there.

If you find that your statement needs to be expanded, ask yourself if you’ve addressed both the “what?” and the “so what?” of your experiences. Have you clarified how you were involved, what you learned, and how it has informed your decision to attend graduate school and your specific research interests? Or how it has been a valuable part of your journey?