I served as the Director of Graduate Studies in the English department at Lehigh for three years; before that, I served on the graduate admissions committee for more than a decade. I also served for a couple of years as a Placement Advisor for our M.A. students applying to external Ph.D. programs. Over that time, I read hundreds, if not thousands, of applications, and advised dozens of my own students. Here are some tips for the Statement of Purpose, one of the most important documents in the graduate school application. This document emerged out of committee work, so some of my colleagues in the English department may have contributed ideas or language to the document below, though the vast majority of the prose is my own.
If people find this useful, I might also add some additional tips -- for the writing sample and other documents that may be part of the application process.
Applicants will also want to be aware of the extreme challenges of the current academic job market for English Ph.D.s. These tips assume you already know how bad things are, and still want to give it a go.
What is the Statement of Purpose?
General hint: this is a very challenging document to write for most applicants, and you should plan to do several drafts & versions. Start early! Preferably in the summer before the fall when you will be applying. Before you start to write, take some time to think about how you'd like to present yourself professionally and intellectually.
As you work on the document, you should also plan to get feedback from trusted friends (especially those who know how English graduate programs work) and faculty mentors. It is especially important that faculty mentors writing recommendation letters for you see your SOP, as they will inevitably be using that to shape their own letters on your behalf.
Fundamentally: The SOP should
1) describe your research interests, including traditional period and region interests,
2) give an overview of previous experience and background (courses taken, sampling of topics covered), and
3) identify theoretical investments.
Overall, this is the most important part of your entire application, and should be very carefully written and polished.
1) Research interests: period & region. Above, I used the phrase "traditional period and region interests." For Ph.D. programs, these should typically be recognizable "MLA Job List" categories: Rhetoric & Composition, Early Modern, 18th-century British, early American, 19th-century American, 20th-century American, Victorian British (1840-1900), British Romanticism (1790-1830), Modernism, Anglophone Postcolonial / Global South, Indigenous American, African American, Asian American, Latinx, and so on. (See the Academic Jobs Wiki to get a sense of what these look like if you aren't sure.) Obviously, you will want to specify within one or two of those categories. Ideally, narrower historical areas of interest should be linked back to what we call a "traditional major field." So, for example, if you are interested in literature related to British colonialism/the British Empire in the 19th century, you will probably want to identify as an aspiring Victorianist (and maybe a Modernist).
It is not a problem to name two historically adjacent fields, or a single historical field with a transnational or global orientation ("Transnational 19th century" or "Fin de Siecle" ["Late 19th century / Early 20th century"]). It might be more of an issue to name two periods that are not adjacent or not complementary (think "Shakespeare" and "Contemporary Horror Film").
Exceptions: There are of course exceptions to the "traditional period and region interests" rule, depending on individual programs. Since about 2010, many English graduate programs have slowly been moving away from traditional fields, but most senior faculty were hired under those field designations and still adhere to them to a greater or lesser extent. For example, my own department currently has specialists in Horror film & fiction and Medical Humanities. If you were to apply to Lehigh and you are singularly interested in Horror as a genre, you could do that even though it is not a traditional period or region interest. Something analogous might hold true in programs elsewhere; if you're unsure, you might want to directly write the faculty specialist in a given area to ask whether they regularly supervise dissertations in that particular field.
Naming an interesting research question: You do not absolutely have to do this, and if you do do it it's by no means binding, but putting forward an interesting research question relevant to your research interests -- something you might have worked on already, but want to explore further -- could be an effective way to show that you know what some current topics of interest are in that area. It also shows that you are bringing your own agenda to the table intellectually. The ability to define one's own research questions is an important distinction between graduate and undergraduate work in literature.
2) Previous experience and background. Here, you might want to specify some particular courses and topics you've worked on in your college experience or M.A. program (if applying for the Ph.D.). They do not have to be absolutely identical with your forward-pointing research interests (#1 above), but they should be in the ballpark. For instance, if you would like to work in the medical humanities area and you wrote a paper about "Vampirism as a Metaphor for Venereal Disease" in a Victorian literature course, you might want to mention that even if the course as a whole wasn't a Medical Humanities course. Again, you do not want to go too deep into the syllabus or your own papers for the class; you are not aiming to be comprehensive, but rather to give the admissions committee some confidence that you have some experience working in the research area you say you want to explore further.
3) Theoretical investments. How you do this part can vary a good deal from program to program. For elite programs (Ivy+ and state schools like Michigan, UC schools, Wisconsin), a relationship to "theory" is going to be absolutely essential. That said, for other programs it can really vary (indeed, there are probably some state schools where sounding too "theoryish" could actually be a liability). To specify your investments, you want to use language that feels current and timely without being overly technical. "Contemporary Marxist Theory"; "Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory"; "Queer and Trans Theory"; "Critical Race Theory" -- those are the types of labels you probably want to think about. If you have a particularly strong connection to a particular slice of that type of scholarship, you might want to mention a name or two (i.e., "Jasbir Puar's assemblage-oriented approach to intersectional queer / feminist theory"). And it can be a little slippery from subfield to subfield. For instance, "medical humanities" and "digital humanities" might satisfy "theoretical investment," though in some ways they are really more methodologies than theoretical orientations.
Exceptions and complications: In our program, we do get a number of applications from students at the M.A. level who might have attended smaller colleges where they had very little exposure to theory. This is not necessarily a sticking point. Students with exceptional analytical writing skills and interesting ideas can sometimes be admitted to graduate programs even without that theoretical background. That said, if you have no idea what I'm referring to if I use the phrase "decolonial theory" or if I mention the name Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, you 1) might want to read up on it now, and 2) consider applying to an M.A. program to broaden your knowledge base and experience before going for the Ph.D.
Structure: The three points above might suggest a sense of structure. You definitely want a substantial paragraph for #1 and probably one for #2. Ideally, it would be great to weave #3 above into those two paragraphs. Overall, the Statement of Purpose can be structured as a story about your intellectual growth and development, but it should not be overly autobiographical.
And it should absolutely not have an account of how much you love to read… Everyone interested in graduate school loves to read; this is not a qualification.
Coherence: This is one of the toughest parts to figure out. What combination of your forward-looking statement of interest and your backwards-facing description of previous experience tells the most coherent story? You might have written an excellent paper at some point on trans characters in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which your professor loved and said might even be publishable. But if your research focus is going to be 20th/21st century LGBTQIA+ North American literature, you should only mention that killer Shakespeare paper in passing if at all.
Tailoring: Towards the end of the statement, you should have at least some ‘tailoring’ to particularities of individual programs – name a couple of key faculty members and connect your interests to theirs. Do not do this as a simple list. Your 'tailored' paragraph should be carefully structured and show that you know what each faculty member's research interests are.
Here, be careful here to differentiate between faculty who teach graduate students and those who don't. In most English departments, only tenure-track faculty teach graduate students, so Lecturers, Visiting Assistant Professors, and Professors of Practice probably should not be on your list. Emeritus faculty should also not be listed, as they no longer teach.
Also, are there particular interdisciplinary programs that seem especially relevant to you?
Presumably, you have already done careful research on programs where you'll be applying, so the tailoring paragraph should not be too hard.
Note: if you cannot find at least two faculty you might like to work with in an individual graduate program, that is probably not the right graduate program for you!