Abstract—As an academic promotional genre, personal statements play an important role in the admission process. Previous research has focused primarily on personal statements for postgraduate programs and doctoral applications. Few studies have been carried out on college application essays. Based on the theory of interpersonal function of functionalism linguistics, this study analyzes a corpus of 50 successful Ivy League application essays and finds the features of the realization of interpersonal function in college application essays. The findings of this study will be beneficial for prospective applicants in their future endeavors.
Index Terms—Application essay, epistemic attitude, interpersonal function, valuative attitude
Qi Li is with the School of Foreign Languages and Business, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055 China.
Dongmei Ge is with Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.
*Correspondence: liqi@szpu.edu.cn (Q.L.)
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Cite:Qi Li and Dongmei Ge, "Exploring Interpersonal Function in College Application Essays," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 441-444, 2023.