As discourse genre, purpose statements are featured by their occluded status in the academy and by their hybrid nature. Purpose Statements are needed in requests for a place in a postgraduate course (Master’s degree or doctorate), and they are invited to acquire information about the academic and professional background and abilities of each applicant. An inquiry of the genre’s linguistic and textual features is required in Spanish to detect and grasp writers’ and readers’ observance of this genre. A corpus of 50 motivation letters in Spanish is explored here. This paper examines the differentiating macro- and microtextual attributes of this specific genre and co-occurrences between both kinds of attributes. At the macrotextual level, statements of purpose evidence prototypical rhetorical moves, which can be subsumed as writers’ moves and readers’ moves. On the microtextual level, modalization resources and discourse markers are debated. This multiple views assay of the corpus displays evidence of purposeful co-occurrences among modalization, discourse markers, and rhetorical moves. Writers’ ideal representations of this discourse genre, which strains the academic and professional domains, can also be inferred.