紫色字是我認為每段的重點綱要，而綠字是重點細節。另外黃色底的字是比較 "強勢" ＊的詞句，也是台灣學生常因過於謙虛或委婉而較少使用的句型。可多參考利用。
＊我在史丹佛修寫作課程時，教授經常強調動詞的重要性。ㄧ個生動而有力的動詞可以使文句更有重點，而主動句型往往能強調作者獨立自主的精神。
第一段：學術興趣介紹
我對認知科學中的語言領域感興趣，因此開宗明義就這麼說了，再細部舉出覺得特別有趣的議題。我以 "puzzle" 為喻衣，以示探索語言的結構與功能是完成認知科學拼圖的關鍵。
My goal is to uncover the complex relationship between humans and language through research in Cognitive Psychology. This relationship has many layers—from how we learn to map meanings onto words and sentences, to how language shapes thought and the ways we reason about the world, to how we interpret ambiguous utterances or understand a novel metaphor. The various pieces of language fit together to form a puzzle of human intelligence. It is my goal to gain a deeper knowledge of this puzzle and to find the pieces that help complete it.
第二段：學術興趣介紹 ＋學術經歷
形容對語言產生興趣的過程以及大學時修的相關課程。
I grew up in Taiwan and attended Chinese-speaking schools, where I learned nuances of the English language by reading outside of the classroom. Masterpieces composed in both Chinese and English exposed me to the power of language and the creative mind. This power pushed me throughout my undergraduate career to understand the unique human abilities that drive communication and culture. I enrolled in an intensive humanities program called Structured Liberal Education and minored in Creative Writing. However, what brought me closest to the heart of language were my classes in psychology and linguistics. Through areas such as linguistic meaning and how language shapes thought, my fascination with language expanded from literature to fundamental questions about cognition. I majored in Symbolic Systems with a concentration in Cognitive Science, and my background in psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, and literature provided me with a broad perspective as well as tools to further my understanding of language through research.
第三～五段：學術經歷
以下三段形容我的研究經歷以及研究對認知科學的貢獻。
I initiated a research project during my sophomore year that tested factors affecting perceived writing quality in English and Chinese. Under Professor R’s guidance, I examined how people with different reading habits evaluate the writing quality of literary and expository texts. We found that people who read more literary writing have a more nuanced sensitivity to linguistic distributions, which allows them to distinguish between subtle word choice differences in literary writing. This finding suggests that experience may shape specific mental representations of language. Furthermore, reading literature enriches our language skills by exposing us to different types of linguistic distributions. This research was published in the proceedings of the C conference, and I presented our findings at the P meeting.
My experience conducting independent research made me eager to do more. I am currently working on my honors thesis under the guidance of Professors J and B. In my thesis, I use methods in computational linguistics and cognitive psychology to examine how poetry manipulates readers’ expectations to create sensations of beauty. I am in the process of developing a Bayesian model of literary aesthetics, which detects “regions of beauty” in poetry by identifying surprising words followed by words that resolve the surprise. I will also conduct behavioral experiments to test the effects of reading poetic metaphors, my hypothesis being that metaphors perceived as more beautiful will produce stronger metaphoric associations.
In addition to these two projects, I worked at Professor R's C lab for two years, where I contributed to studies on language learning and categorization by conducting literature reviews, writing research synopses, and analyzing data. I also worked with Professor J and the Stanford N Group to examine how humans and machine syntactic parsers process difficult sentences. To gain more skills in computational linguistics, I was a research intern at the 20XX L Workshop at J University, where I worked on A with an international team of researchers. I modeled duration distributions of audio signals and designed novel features that significantly improved state-of-the-art s performance. Through these experiences, I acquired the technical skills and theoretical background to conduct interdisciplinary research in language and cognition.
第六段：學術經歷
形容我的教學經驗與表現。
While my desire to contribute to scholarship pushes me to further my abilities through research, the excitement of sharing knowledge motivates me to teach. I was a teaching assistant for Introduction to Psychology during my sophomore year, and received an Undergraduate Student Teaching Award as well as excellent teaching evaluations. I am currently an Advising Fellow for the Symbolic Systems Program. I enjoy mentoring new students and introducing them to the exciting field of cognitive science. Together, my research and teaching experiences have shaped my career aspirations. I hope to become a professor in order to pass on the joy of learning and advance new generations of ideas in cognitive psychology.
第七段：短中長期目標
形容進入研究所後希望探索的研究主題。作研究 knowing how to ask the right questions 很重要，所以我選擇用問句闡述研究興趣。
As I pursue research in a Ph.D. program and beyond, I plan to apply behavioral and computational methods to the study of language. My interests in language, cognition, and literature converge in questions such as, how do metaphors in different languages affect the ways people speak, write, and think? How do people reason about characters and events in fictional worlds and adopt new premises that override those in reality? How can our attraction to certain rhetorical or literary devices inform our knowledge of language processing, or help us analyze “good writing” computationally? I believe that metaphor, fiction, and rhetoric can give us insight into general cognitive functions such as how we find associations between concepts, reason about other people’s goals and intentions, and learn to communicate effectively by exploiting linguistic patterns and structures. I am also more broadly interested in combining behavioral experiments and computational models to examine the mechanisms behind cognitive phenomena.
第八段：欣賞本校系的原因
I am drawn to Stanford’s Ph.D. program in Cognitive Psychology by the faculty members’ exciting and innovative research. Professor B’s research reveals fundamental relationships between language and thought, which is closely connected to my interest in metaphors across languages. I hope to continue working with Professor B on poetic metaphors and extend the research to my native language in Chinese. I am very interested in Professor G’s research on computational models of cognition, in particular his work on how beliefs about others’ intents affect our reasoning about causality. I am interested in how these findings may apply to inferences we make in order to understand fictional narrative. I am also fascinated by Professor F’s research on statistical learning mechanisms in language acquisition. As a Symbolic Systems student, I experienced the enthusiasm and creativity of faculty members at Stanford’s Psychology Department. I believe that my interdisciplinary interests and background would contribute to the department, and feel certain that this is an environment in which I would grow.
第九段：總結
強調我研究語言和認知的強烈動機。另外再次提出 "puzzle" 的比喻，和首段輝映。
The beauty and importance of language have driven me to understand it through literature, cognition, and their synthesis through research. I look forward to continuing this journey to fill in the missing pieces in the puzzle of human intelligence. Thank you very much for your consideration.
The beauty and importance of language have driven me to understand it through literature, cognition, and their synthesis through research. I look forward to continuing this journey to fill in the missing pieces in the puzzle of human intelligence. Thank you very much for your consideration.
