biography academic writing

How to Write a Good Academic Biography (Part 1)

When your journal article gets accepted or you are preparing for a public presentation, you will often be asked for a short academic biography. For many people, these academic bios are more difficult to write than a dissertation. How do you sum up yourself and your work in 3-5 sentences? What do you need to include? What should you leave out?

What You Should Do

• Start with your full name followed by your current position, your general interests, and your current project, keeping them all very brief.
• If you are within a year of receiving a prestigious award, mention that as well.
• Finally, finish with a sentence that’s personal: add a hobby, a pet’s name, the city you live in—whatever you are comfortable with that is personal but not too private.

What You Should Avoid

• Avoid speaking in the first person, i.e., don’t use “I.”
• Don’t divulge details beyond your current position.
• In a longer bio of multiple paragraphs, you may add more awards and information about your master’s and bachelor’s degrees, but not in a short bio. Moreover, don’t add anything that happened before grad school—including your place of birth. For example:

Hi! My name is Scott. I was originally born in Vermont and now I’m a professor at North Yankee University in Fargone, New York (in upstate New York). I study antelopes’ migration patterns and their impact of native grain growth. My interest in antelopes began as a teenager when I first saw one in the wild. I did my undergrad degree in biology at SUNY and my masters and UCLA and my PhD in Forestry at Hunter College.

Related: Finished drafting your academic biography and heading for an international conference? Check out this post now!

The above example is far too casual and Scott’s work and current position are overshadowed by all the other random details. This can be written in a much better way:

Scott Sampson is a professor of Wildlife Biology at North Yankee University. His work focuses specifically on the migration patterns of antelope and their impact on the growth of native grain. His favorite place to do research in his backyard, which opens to the Akron National Forest.

This improvised version is concise, relevant, and makes Scott’s bio appear professional while giving a short description of his personal details.

Longer Bios

For longer bios, follow the same basic rules, but go into a bit more depth about your work, your education, and your future projects or interests. You may also consider adding a line about your immediate family. But as always, leave the personal details for a short and friendly mention at the end of the bio.

Mostly, your bio will be used by someone to introduce you at a conference or public event so if you write your bio using these tips, you will help them give a smooth and accurate introduction. Remember that the bio is the first thing that people know about you so pack it full of the most important things about yourself!

If you would like to know more about different formats of academic biography, read the next article in this series!

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How to Write a Good Academic Biography (Part 2)

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Writing your academic biography

You’ll often be asked to submit an academic biography if you propose a conference paper, contribute a chapter to an edited collection, or publish a journal article or book. Even early in your research candidature, it can’t hurt to start thinking about your bio. There are a few different ways that you can go about writing yours. In this blog post, I offer five different formulations: the short-and-sweet bio; the brief bio; the detailed bio; the independent scholar bio; and the academic-adjacent bio.

The short-and-sweet bio

Formula : [Name] is a [position] at [institution].

Example : Big Bird is a doctoral student at Sesame College.

When to use it : You can never go too wrong with the short-and-sweet approach. Scholars at all levels use it for books, articles, conference papers, blog posts… everything, really.

Why it’s good : It’s quick to update and doesn’t require much thinking.

The brief bio

Formula : [Name] is a [position] at [institution] + main research interests include [this] and [this] + has recently [done this thing] + tweets at [Twitter handle] OR [Name] is a [position] at [institution] + [doctoral/current] research project studies [this] and [this] + tweets at [Twitter handle].

Example : Dr Abby Cadabby is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Upper West Side. Her main research interests include a decolonial approach to Fairy Studies, and she recently published the edited volume Rhyme Time: Creative Methods (2023, Sesame Books). She tweets at @AbbyCadabbySST.

When to use it : You’ll probably use this one quite often – it’s my favourite. Like the short-and-sweet approach, the brief biography (around 50 words or so) gives people a sense of you and your work (and how to contact or find out more about you). This one is versatile; you can use it anywhere a bio is requested.

Why it’s good : I like this version because it strikes a nice balance of enough-but-not-too-much detail, but most importantly, it has contact details for people to find you even when you switch roles or institutions. (This is why a social media handle is good in bios over email addresses – you tend to keep the same one even when you leave a job.)

The detailed biography

Formula : The brief biography + more detail (things like publications, projects, experience, research themes, teaching background, any awards your research has received)

Example : A/Prof Count von Count is an Associate Professor in Mathematics at the University of Manhattan. His main research interest is counting things, and he recently published his latest book, The Number of the Day (2022, University of Manhattan Press). He is a vocal advocate for vampire rights and was one of the founders of Vampires Lobbying Against Discrimination (VLAD). He is frequently invited to discuss his research in various media outlets. He contributes to public policy in the public service announcements that he delivers in support of the United States Census. Count tweets at @CountVonCount.

When to use it : The detailed biography is often used by more experienced academics who have published extensively and have notable public outreach activities or collaborations that they want to include or multiple affiliations with different institutions. However, it might still be appropriate to use a longer bio if you’re being interviewed for a profile piece (like many of the guest bloggers do for the (academic) writer  posts …) or on promotional material, like if your work is the focus of a seminar.

Why it’s good : This version gives readers a really good sense of who you are and the kind of work that you do. It is also good for university staff pages. That said, I would caution against using a longer bio if you don’t have much to put in it (yet!). It makes more sense to have a succinct but very focused biography than one that is longer and contains information that might be of less interest to the reader (such as unrelated work experience).

The independent scholar bio

Formula : [Name]’s research interests include [this] and [this] + overview of publications/activities + tweets at [Twitter handle].

Example : Dr Elmo’s research interests include early childhood education and toddlers’ language development. Elmo completed his doctoral studies at Sesame College in 2018 and currently hosts Elmo’s World . He can be reached via email at [email protected] and is on Twitter @Elmo.

When to use it : If you don’t have a longer-term role or institution or are an independent scholar, this biography can be a good way of framing yourself.

Why it’s good : If you are between roles or undertaking casual roles across multiple institutions, you may want to formulate your bio in a way that sidesteps naming a position and an institution. That’s where the independent scholar bio can come in handy: it still establishes you as an expert with experience but doesn’t include a formal affiliation. In this case, depending on where the bio will appear, including an email address or a website that isn’t likely to change can be a good way to make it nice and easy for people to contact you.

The academic-adjacent bio

Formula : Up to you!

Example 1 : Cait Hamilton is a creative and highly skilled content creator, developer and editor with industry experience across law, education, publishing, not-for-profit, and government. She is a qualified lawyer, has research and teaching experience in the higher education sector, and holds extensive developmental editing expertise.

Example 2 : Cait Hamilton works with students and academics to turn their brilliant ideas into exceptional writing. She edits , coaches , writes , and researches , and is the founder of Hamilton Editorial , which brings all of these things together. Her favourite pen is a classic Bic biro, and she’s yet to come across a writing problem that can’t be solved with a little time, a stack of Post-it notes, and a good-sized whiteboard.

When to use it : Increasingly, academics are starting side – or full-time! – hustles outside of academia, and a traditional academic bio doesn’t necessarily make sense for this kind of work. In the examples above, you can see two versions of my academic-adjacent bio. Example 1 is the one I used when I was starting to develop my career outside of academia. I didn’t have a clear sense of the work I was interested in, so I framed myself and my experience widely. As it has gradually become clearer to me the work I really love doing (and what I want Hamilton Editorial to become), I’ve tweaked my bio accordingly. Example 2 is the version I currently use on things like the contact page of the website and LinkedIn.

Why it’s good : There’s much more scope to personalise this bio – you can see how different the two examples of my bio are. I’ve also found it easier to let my voice come through more clearly in this bio than in my earlier academic bios, but that could be because I’m now doing a different kind of work (and working for myself!).

Of course, you could well have different bios for different audiences or purposes – the entry on your staff page, for example, might be very different from the biography you use to accompany a guest blog whose readers are familiar with your field, which will be different again to the version you use on the back of your book.

And aside from being useful to have on hand, drafting your academic bio can be a good opportunity to reflect on how you want to present yourself as a researcher. In the same way you have an ‘elevator pitch’ version of your research, drafting your bio means thinking about strategically positioning yourself as a researcher, which is never a bad exercise to undertake at any stage of your career.

Introducing ‘the (academic) writer’…

The five emails every research assistant should be sending.

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How to Write an Academic Bio for Conferences

There are very few things as challenging as writing academic biographies (perhaps academic writing?). It seems simple, but things soon get awkward as you try to show how amazing you are without sounding arrogation or pretentious. Sophie shares her tips on writing a balanced bio…

It’s all going swimmingly until you read the Call for Papers: Please submit a proposal and brief bio.

What on earth is a bio (otherwise known as an ‘academic bio’)? And just how brief does it need to be? Writing an academic bio is a skill you can pick up like any other, and this article will take you through the basics of what to include, what to leave out, and how to craft this tricky piece of your academic arsenal.

Covering the Basics

Whatever discipline you’re working in, you’ll definitely need to include the following in your academic bio:

•  full name,
• position (i.e. PhD student; PhD candidate),
• institution.

All this should go into the first sentence, so it reads something like this:

Joe Bloggs is currently a PhD candidate [meaning he’s passed his upgrade] at the University of Warwick.

You can also mention your department, although it’s not strictly necessary for most of us.

The Big Picture

The rest of your academic bio should tell the reader about your research interests. Start by setting out your broad research question , whether that’s finding new ways to create Omega 3 in algae cultures or exploring fashion statements at Charles II’s court. Then focus it further; are you looking at a specific type of algae culture, or a particular poet who was into fashion? This is the most important part of your bio: it tells other people attending the conference where you’re coming from, and may present links between your research areas.

You can end your bio here, or add another sentence situating your research within wider scholarship. Is it important to reference your specific style of criticism, or how you’re leading on from recently-published developments in the field, for example? If it’s important for the theme of the conference, you may wish to add another sentence on the future directions of your research. However, if this isn’t relevant or necessary, feel free to leave it out, especially if you’ve been asked to submit a brief bio – best to keep it brief and stick to your research interests.

What Not to Do

Inevitably, we all do things early in our career/academic life that, with hindsight, make us cringe. To avoid that uncomfortable feeling in the future, four common errors are:

• Treating your bio like a humorous essay : only include a joke if you’re sure it’s really, really funny (maybe check with a straight-talking friend).
• Getting too personal : an academic bio is a chance to make an impression pre-conference, and it may be what people remember you by, so ensure that you stay professional.
• Giving too much information : remember that an academic bio isn’t the same thing as a CV – the conference organisers don’t need to know where you did your undergrad, MA or how much you’ve won in grants.
• Using exclamation marks : your writing should be relatively formal in style, so avoid coming across as too chatty – save your engaging manners for the big presentation day!

One final tip is to use the third person. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but at some conferences, your bio will be read out as an introduction, so personally I prefer to start a sentence like Joe Bloggs above.

What do you think about this approach?

Any more tips for writing academic bios?

Text credits: Sophie Shorland 

Sophie is a PhD student at Warwick, where she’s one of the organisers of the English Department’s annual postgraduate symposium for 2017. You can find out how to get involved in the symposium here , or check their Twitter here .  

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What a concidence. I’m sending the abstract and the bio for a conference at Warwick

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CVs, Resumes, and LinkedIn pp 167–171 Cite as

WRITING A BIO

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Part of the book series: Guides to Professional English ((GPE))

Things to mention:

• your academic qualifications

• previous and current positions

• previous, present and future projects

• publications and conferences

• committees, patents and awards

• third person (i.e. he developed rather than I developed ) for conferences and book chapters

• first person for home pages

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Summary: Writing a Bio

your academic qualifications

previous and current positions

previous, present and future projects

publications and conferences

committees, patents and awards

third person (i.e. he developed rather than I developed ) for conferences and book chapters

first person for home pages

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Wallwork, A. (2014). WRITING A BIO. In: CVs, Resumes, and LinkedIn. Guides to Professional English. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0647-5_13

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As an academic researcher, you’ve been putting together long manuscripts for years. Throughout your college courses and long into your graduate school classes, you’ve learned how to write specialized papers on difficult subjects, and while they’re not usually what most people would call “fun,” they’re also not the stressful task they once were.

But no matter how “old hat” it is to write a long dissertation or a manuscript of your experiment’s outcome, one thing that is consistent around most researchers is the difficulty that ensues when writing up one’s own academic biography. When asked to do so, this often strikes fear into the most hardened of scholars. It doesn’t have to, though. If you include these elements in your next academic biography, you can have an interesting bio that only needs tweaking when it’s time to update it after you’ve made more professional achievements.

When You Need an Academic Biography

If you’ve made it this far in your career without needing an academic biography, that’s great! But if you plan to stay in the field where publishing papers is expected, you’re going to need this attached to your submissions regularly. It’s time to make one and get comfortable with it.

Academic biographies are the place where your academic career is shared with the reader, showcasing your expertise in your field and why the person reading your paper should believe you. Your credentials are highlighted here, demonstrating the essentials that prove that you’re a reputable academic scholar.

Biographies are usually requested any time you submit a paper to a journal for publishing or are asked to (or you request to) present at a conference. They’re also posted on your department’s website or your own personal website and social media platforms. While the aspects of your career stay the same, you would tailor the biography’s elements based upon the platform where you’re posting it. For instance, your social media profile is going to look slightly different than what you’d send to a journal when you request them to publish your manuscript.

What Should Go in Your Bio?

What goes in your biography will vary based on where you’re publishing it, but these elements are the basic foundation of an academic bio and should always be included:

●      Your demographics - as much or little as you want the audience to know - such as your date of birth, current city of residence, educational background, applicable professional experience, and area of specialization

●      Any major achievements that you have that would be related to your field of study or the attached document if you’re sending it for publication

You can go further into detail on any of these elements if your biography needs to meet a certain word count. However, only include factual information that is related to your professional experience. You can always link to and copy quotes from articles written about you, add a picture of yourself, or include some interesting facts that will engage your reader.

How to Make Yours Interesting

When it comes to writing a good biography, there’s only so much you can do without embellishing facts if you don’t have a lot of exciting moments in your academic career. But you can still make your bio interesting. The trick is to consider your audience and then write for them.

Think about your ideal person reading the biography. Who is your target? Imagine that you’re writing to them, not to any potential people who might be uninterested in your life and career.

When you start writing with this perspective in mind, you’ll feel more willing to share interesting tidbits and details because you know the reader will appreciate them. Focus on what makes you stand out from others in your field, any accomplishments you’ve had that made you proud, and don’t look at these factors as though you’re bragging. Your reader wants to know these things!

Include your education, but don’t go into elaborate detail about it. If you were involved in any relevant research experiments during those years, you can talk about the outcome and your part in it.

One final thing to include is anything that personalizes you and connects the reader to you as a human being. Bring up your spouse and children, your furry family members, your favorite hobbies, and things like that in order to make you seem more approachable.

Writing Your Academic Bio: Impactio Makes it Easy

You might not wake up in the middle of the night stressing your upcoming speech or that paper you forgot to write, but knowing you need to create an academic biography can cause that same anxiety. With Impactio’s professional network, this becomes a breeze.

Optimize your biography and include it in your resume, connect with other scholars to see how they create theirs, and prepare yourself for a professional approach when you use Impactio as your platform to share your expertise.

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Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World

How to write a biography

Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology

• By Edwin L. Battistella
• July 1 st 2018

This year I’ve been reading a lot of biographies and writing some short profile pieces. Both experiences have caused me to reflect back on a book-length biography I wrote a few years ago on the little-known educator Sherwin Cody .

I first learned about Sherwin Cody as an adolescent, when I spotted his “remarkable invention [that] has improved the speech and writing of thousands of people” in the back of a comic book. (It turned out to be a patented workbook of grammar exercises.) Many years later, reading about the history of writing instruction, I became fascinated by Cody’s life and career, so much so that I decided to tell his story. The rest is history, or more accurately, biography.

Writing a book-length biography was a new experience for me at the time. I learned a lot along the way. Here are a few tips based on my experience.

Start small —A good way to begin is by writing a short profile of your subject in no more than 1,000 words. Imagine it as a short encyclopedia piece or obituary of the person that encapsulates the basic story (the who, what, where, when and how ) along with discussion of significant accomplishments and challenges. The profile will tell you if you know enough to write more and also help you to clarify your stance toward the subject. If you feel too strongly about your subject you may not be the ideal person to write a biography. There may be a temptation to adulate or unmask.

Figure out the contexts— Spend some time studying the individual’s era. What was the state of the world during the person’s lifetime, and how did major events intersect with your subject’s life. The context can be large-scale, taking in the sweep of history over several generations, or finely grained, covering one life span. But understanding the world as it was will give you a sense of how your subject may have seen it.

If you are writing about someone who has already been the subject of biographical work, you also need to consider the context of what other writers have said. How does your effort add to the story? Do you have new material? Has there been a re-evaluation of the individual? Has society changed in such a way that the person has new relevance? Is there an anniversary on the horizon? (You’ll want to plan way ahead for that last one!)

Develop a research network— As you dig into your work, be on the lookout for new material. Is archival material coming available? Are there family members who have recollections or bits of ephemera? Can you find some librarians or archivists or historical society staffers who share your interest? Some of this research may involve travel and/or copying fees, so keep that cost in mind.

Engage the backstory— Part of the enjoyment of writing a biography is that it allows you to put together a mystery not just out of large events, but out of small puzzle pieces as well. A description of some event during a person’s college years or on a vacation, for example, can illustrate their personality just as well as a large life event does, and it can make the subject relatable to readers who may have had a similar experience. Finding the sweet spot between too much digression and just enough backstory will not come immediately but it is worth the effort.

Be open to refocusing your idea— As you write and learn more about your subject, it may turn out that the story you are writing is not really about just one person. Perhaps it is a story about an ensemble of like-minded people, or a movement, and perhaps the stories of others are just as fascinating and important. Your work could turn out to be about a group working together or in opposition, or about people set in different times or places brought together by common thread. It may not be a biography in the strict sense and that’s fine. You can adjust.

Writing a biography can take an author anywhere. If there is someone whose life fascinates you and that you are in a position to illuminate as a researcher and writer, jump in.

Featured image credit:  Epicantus by Daria. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr .

Edwin L. Battistella teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he has served as a dean and as interim provost. He is the author of Do You Make These Mistakes in English? (OUP, 2009), Bad Language (OUP, 2005), and The Logic of Markedness (OUP, 1996). He is also the author of  Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology .

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The Research Whisperer

Just like the thesis whisperer – but with more money, where i stand: rewriting the academic bio.

This piece was first published on Tamson Pietsch’s blog, Cap and Gown ( capandgown.wordpress.com ) on 17 July 2019.

You can follow Tamson on Twitter at @cap_and_gown .

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about expertise and its history and the ways that academics like me deploy it to underpin our knowledge and authority claims.

This is my current bio, taken from my UTS website:

It is a bio that is geared towards establishing my standing as a professional and as an expert, who is fluent in a language of specialised knowledge that is portable, authoritative and objective.

And this language does work. Since the early part of the twentieth century university credentialed expertise has extended its reach into more and more knowledge domains,  underpinning the technocratic forms of rule-making that have shaped our societies, political systems and economies. Today it continues to be my passport to speak in academic and professional contexts across the world.

The problem is, I’m just not sure that apparently objective and disembodied expertise is what our world needs any more (if it ever did), and not least because there is no such thing as objective and disembodied knowledge free from social and economic relations in the first place.

When you look at it, my academic bio says very little about me. Although it obliquely speaks to some episodes in my life that were hugely important to me (my time at Oxford for example), it says little about where I come from and the forces and belongings that fashioned me. It does not reveal my values, my obligations or my commitments, and it speaks in only the most minimal terms about where I live, why I do what I do, and how that is connected to the community in which I make my home. The only thing to which it holds me accountable is the world of trans-local expertise and the institutions that retail in it.

Reading Bruno Latour’s recent book  Down to Earth: Politics in the new Climate Regime * has mobilised me to try something quite different and unfamiliar. He ends his book by introducing himself and describing “where he would like to land”. In the process he turns on its head the usual formula for performing academic credentials to re-situate himself in a place and a set of values, hopes and solidarities.

So, following Latour, I’ve attempted to write a different kind of academic biography, one that locates me as a part of an historical process of formation (familial, settler colonial, religious), points to the ground I call home, foregrounds my commitments and my values, and understands my institutional location as the outcome of these commitments.

In short, it makes me political. But it also makes me a person who is much more than a brain on a stick.

It was, I confess, deeply uncomfortable to write, and probably it’s still a work in progress. Stripping away the apparatus of status built up over nearly twenty years (eek) of life in universities, made me feel vulnerable and exposed.

But I think that, really, is the point. In speaking about where I stand, I make myself available. And from there grows the possibility of relationships with both others and with places, and of common action. And goodness knows, that is what the world is going to need a lot more of as we find a way to live together in our common home.

Tamson Pietsch was born and grew up in Adelaide on the lands of the Kaurna people, as part of Australia’s German Lutheran community, and now makes her home in Sydney. She believes that the ways we make sense of who we are and how we got here helps to shape the societies we are striving to build. Tamson is committed to the roles that universities and other cultural institutions play as homes of this meaning-making. This commitment has been shaped by experiences and relationships made in academic and civic institutions in Adelaide, Melbourne, Oxford and London. It is a commitment that underpins Tamson’s work as an historian of higher education and ideas, and as Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. 

* Go read this book! Not only has it helped me make sense of the entangled politics of ecological destruction, inequality, deregulation and globalisation, but it also points to an alternative. We need to learn new ways to inhabit the earth in order to live together in our common home.

Share this:

Thanks Tamson. I love this post. Simon.

Really nice one! I think this will also make academics easily relatable to students and activists seeking specific expertise.

Lovely post. Thank you.

[…] [1]: I found Tamson’s post when it was reposted on the Research Whisperer. […]

[…] started with my own university story, drawing inspiration from Tamson Pietsch’s (2019) call to rewrite academic biographies to locate the self as “a part of an historical process of formation (familial, settler colonial, […]

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All About You: Writing Your Academic Biography

After a paper has been accepted or a conference talk has been arranged, you may be asked to provide your academic biography. For publications and conference presentations, you may be asked for a short one of 30 to 50 words. Applying for grants and jobs may require a longer biography between 200 and 400 words. Writing about yourself can be uncomfortable, but there is a way to write an effective biography without feeling like you’re boasting.

For a short biography, the following should be included:

• your full name
• institution
• research interests in brief

Here is an example.

Dr. June Ava Smith is a professor at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on identifying and understanding key pathways involved in the development of soybean root nodules. Identification of these pathways may allow non-legumes to be engineered for nodule formation.

A longer biography will have multiple paragraphs and should include the following:

• academic degrees
• current position
• research interests
• awards or distinctions
• publications

Here are a sample of longer biographies: Leanne Jones, PhD Principal Investigator

1. Write in formal language and in the third person. 2. Use humor sparingly. Save the comedy for your stand-up act. 3. Do not divulge too much personal information. 4. Do not pack it with all of the information in your CV. 5. Avoid exclamation marks and symbols like emojis.

Remember that although you’re writing about yourself, you’re helping others to understand your academic credentials when they’re introducing you for a talk or assessing your grant proposal. Let your light shine!

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How to Write a Biography

Learn how to write a biography with our comprehensive guide.

Last updated on Dec 8th, 2023

When you click on affiliate links on QuillMuse.com and make a purchase, you won’t pay a penny more, but we’ll get a small commission—this helps us keep up with publishing valuable content on QuillMuse.  Read More .

Table of Contents

How to write a biography can be a fun challenge as you share someone’s life story with readers. You may need to write a biography for a class or decide to write a biography as a personal project. Once you’ve identified the subject of your biography, do your research to learn as much as you can about them. Then, immerse yourself in writing the biography and revising it until it’s best. What I am going to share with you in today’s post is how to write a biography. If you want to know the rules of how to write a biography correctly then this post of ours is essential for you. 

Introduction

While it’s true that most biographies involve people in the public eye, sometimes the subject is less well-known. But most of the time, famous or not, the person we’re talking about has an incredible life. Although your students may have a basic understanding of How to write a biography, you should take some time before putting pen to paper to come up with a very clear definition of biography.

Before knowing how to write a biography, let’s first understand what a biography is. A biography is an account of a person’s life written by someone else. Although there is a genre called fictional biography, by definition biographies are mostly non-fiction. In general, biographies trace the subject’s life from early childhood to the present day or until death if the subject is deceased. 

Biography writing is not limited to describing the bare facts of a person’s life. Instead of just listing basic details about their upbringing, interests, education, work, relationships, and deaths, a well-written biography should also paint a picture of a person’s personality as well as that person’s life experiences.

Tips and Tricks For How To Write a Biography

1. ask the subject’s permission to write a biography.

Here are the first tips on how to write a biography. Before starting your research, make sure you get your subject’s consent to write their biography. Ask them if they’re ready to be the subject. Getting their permission will make writing a biography much easier and ensure that they are open to information about their lives.

If the theme does not allow you to write a bio, you can choose another theme. If you decide to publish a profile without the subject’s permission, you may be subject to legal action from the subject. 

If the topic no longer exists, you don’t need to ask permission to write about them. 

2. Research primary sources on the topic

Primary sources may include books, letters, photographs, diaries, newspaper clippings, magazines, Internet articles, magazines, videos, interviews, existing biographies, or autobiographies on the subject. Find these resources in your local library or online. Read as much as you can about the topic and highlight any important information you come across in your sources. 

You can create research questions to help you focus your research on this topic, such as: 

What do I find interesting about this topic? Why is this topic important to readers? 

3. Conduct interviews with subjects and their relatives

Interviewing people will turn your research into reality: the people you interview will be able to tell you stories you can’t find in history books. Interview the subject as well as people close to them, such as spouses, friends, business associates, family members, co-workers, and friends. Interview in person, over the phone, or via email.

For in-person interviews, record them with a voice recorder or voice recorder on your computer or phone. You may need to interview the subject and others multiple times to get the documents you need.

4. Visit places important to the topic

Whenever you want to know how to write a biography, to understand the history of the subject, spend time in places and areas that are significant to the subject. This may be the subject’s childhood home or neighborhood. You can also visit the subject’s workplace and regular meeting places. 

You may also want to visit areas where the subject made important decisions or breakthroughs in their life. Being physically present in the area can give you an idea of what your subjects may have felt and help you write about their experiences more effectively.

5. Research the time and place of the subject’s life

Contextualize your subject’s life by observing what’s going on around them. Consider the period in which they grew up as well as the history of the places they lived. Study the economics, politics, and culture of their time. See current events happening where they live or work.

When you studying how to write a biography, ask yourself about time and place: 

What were the social norms of this period? 

What happened economically and politically? 

How has the political and social environment influenced this topic?

6. Make a timeline of a person’s life

To help you organize your research, create a timeline of a person’s entire life, from birth. Draw a long line on a piece of paper and sketch out as many details about a person’s life as possible. Highlight important events or moments on the timeline. Include important dates, locations, and names. 

If you think about how to write a biography You can also include historical events or moments that affect the topic in the timeline. For example, a conflict or civil war may occur during a person’s lifetime and affect their life.

7. Focus on important events and milestones

Major events can include marriage, birth, or death during a person’s lifetime. They may also achieve milestones like their first successful business venture or their first civil rights march. Highlights key moments in a person’s life so readers clearly understand what’s important to that person and how they influence the world around them.

For example, you might focus on one person’s achievements in the civil rights movement. You could write an entire section about their contributions and participation in major civil rights marches in their hometowns.

8. Cite all sources used in  biography

Most biographies will include information from sources such as books, journal articles, magazines, and interviews. Remember to cite any sources that you directly quote or paraphrase. You can use citations, footnotes, or endnotes. If the biography is for a course, use MLA, APA, or Chicago Style citations according to your instructor’s preference.

9. Reread the biography

Check the biography for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Circle all punctuation marks in the text to confirm they are correct. Read the text backward to check for spelling and grammar errors. 

Having a biography full of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors can frustrate readers and lead to poor grades if you submit your work to the class.

10. Show your biography to others to get their feedback

It is a momentous step of how to write a biography. Once you have completed your draft biography, show it to your colleagues, friends, teachers, and mentors to get their feedback. Ask them if they have a good understanding of someone’s life and if the biography is easy to read. Be open to feedback so you can improve the biography and make it error-free. Revise profile based on feedback from others. Don’t be afraid to trim or edit your biography to suit your readers’ needs.

11. Use flashbacks

Flashbacks happen when you move from the present to the past. You can start with the present moment, and then bring in a scene from the person’s past. Or you could have one chapter focusing on the present and one focusing on the past, alternating as you go.

The flashback scene must be as detailed and realistic as the present-day scene. Use your research notes and interviews with subjects to better understand their past to reminisce. 

For example, you can move from a person’s death in the present to reminiscing about their favorite childhood memory.

12. Outline Your Story Chronologically 

This is another important step in how to write a biography is to write an outline that describes your story in chronological order. An outline is a tool that helps you visualize the structure and key elements of your story. This can help you organize your story into chapters and sections. 

You can write your plan in a digital document or draw it with pen and paper. Remember to store your outline in an easily accessible place so you can refer to it throughout the writing process.

What citation style should I use for my biography?

Use MLA, APA, or Chicago Style citations based on your instructor’s preference when citing sources in your biography.

Should I include personal opinions in a biography?

No, a biography should be objective and based on facts. Avoid injecting personal opinions or bias into the narrative.

What’s the difference between a biography and an autobiography?

A biography is written by someone else about a person’s life, while an autobiography is written by the subject themselves about their own life.

Can I write a biography about a living person?

Yes, you can write a biography about a living person with their consent. Ensure you respect their privacy and follow ethical guidelines when writing about them.

Conclusion 

Other than creating a sense of closure, there are no set rules about how a biography ends. An author may want to summarize their main points about the subject of their biography. If the person is still alive, the author can inform the reader about their condition or circumstances. If the person has died, inheritance can be discussed. Authors can also remind readers how they can learn from the biographical subject. Sharing a closing quote or about a person can leave the audience with a point to consider or discuss in more detail.

For further insights into writing and to avoid common mistakes, check out our article on Most Common Mistakes in Writing . Additionally, explore the Best Writing Tools for Writers to enhance your writing skills and discover the tools that can assist you. If you’re looking to improve your typing speed and accuracy, our article on How to Type Faster with Accuracy offers valuable tips.

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• Dec 8th, 2023
• Oct 22nd, 2023

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7 Different Ways to Write a Great Biography

Ever considered writing a biography? Individual decisions and circumstances shape life stories, but so do biographers. By adapting set patterns, writers determine public opinion of their subject’s lives. Draw inspiration for a future project from this roundup of common approaches.

Journalists and media outlets love biographies, particularly when relatives or academics dispute the most controversial claims.

Some of the favorite topics are instantly familiar: Napoleon’s downfall, Churchill’s leadership, Diana’s letters and her lovers, Sylvia Plath’s relationship with Ted Hughes, the genius of Steve Jobs, and Alan Turing’s sexuality. Each worthy of separate, in-depth discussion. Each a delicate balance between sensationalism and historical interest.

Of course, the trademark combination of gossip and mythmaking has given biography a bad reputation. For some, it seems too much like rummaging through the paper bin, looking for someone’s bank statements or the shreds of a discarded missive.

Or else it seems like a dubious exercise in trying to draw life lessons from someone else’s fame and success, which might have been coincidental or undeserved.

Laying the Groundwork

Researching a biography involves a lot of borrowing and persuading. Anecdotes, interviews, letters and public records are the standard ingredients of every book biography, film biopic, or feature ‘based on a true story’. Getting hold of information may be difficult.

Relatives of the deceased may block access to the diary, friends of the family may demand cash for answering your questions, and obtaining permission to reproduce images will give you grey hairs. You may be overwhelmed by the quantity of books to plough through, or frustrated by the lack of data at your disposal.

“Composing the life requires speculation and interpretation. At times, you’ll marvel at what your subject achieved. Sometimes you’ll be disappointed by their actions, maybe even shocked.”

Composing the life requires speculation and interpretation. At times, you’ll marvel at what your subject achieved. Sometimes you’ll be disappointed by their actions, maybe even shocked. If you’re writing about a dictator or a criminal, you may struggle to strike a balance between humanizing and demonizing them.

If you’re lucky, you’ll stumble across something no-one else has found before and hope it makes waves. If you’re underhand, you’ll make an unverifiable claim and wait for the public outrage.

But let’s assume that you’ve been principled. You’ve found a worthy subject, done the laborious work of searching through the archives and ringing through the phone book, read the relevant literature and thought about the ethical dilemmas. Now it’s time to write, but where should you begin? How do you bring order to the chaos of a life?

1. Cradle to Grave

If in doubt, the ‘cradle to grave’ approach is your fallback option. Put your notes in order, get the chronology sorted, and start work. One by one, tick off the following from your list: birth, family background, childhood influences, schooling and education, early career, professional successes and setbacks, twilight years, death. Choose a first sentence a bit like this:

“Napoleon Buonaparte was born at Ajaccio in the island of Corsica, on the fifteenth day of August, 1769. He was the son of Charles Buonaparte, an advocate in the royal court of assize, and of Letitia Ramolini, a Corsican lady of great beauty, and of a good family, descended from that of Colalto at Naples.” William Hazlitt, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte , 1828

As the conventional approach in Western book biographies for hundreds of years, this may sound like the easy option. Yet a chronological biography has its pitfalls. Expect gaps in the story, mysteries you’ll never solve, and conflicting accounts.

Establishing causality is another dilemma and not only because it’s tricky to prove links between particular experiences and later events. Strands of the story developing in parallel, encounters that only obtain significance many years later, and the after-effects of major turning points all pose a challenge to the apparent simplicity of this approach – also see our biographical piece on Emmeline Pankhurst for an example of the pitfalls and opportunities of a ‘cradle to grave’ story.

2. The Deathbed Departure

Like Agatha Christie, many biographers hold off checking the birth certificate by beginning at the end. Opening with a deathbed scene or the public announcement of the death is a ubiquitous variation on the ‘cradle-to-grave’ structure.

Think of the exaggerated public mourning in a Buenos Aires cinema at the beginning of the film adaptation of Evita , followed immediately by sepia-coloured evocations of Eva’s provincial childhood.

By contrasting a dramatic demise with humble beginnings, you can immediately establish both suspense and a narrative arc.

3. Trace Your Steps

If your research process deserves a book of its own, or if your subject was hard to track down, you may want to put the biographical mechanics on display. Documenting the process of biographical research also allows you to write someone else’s story in the first-person. By revealing your techniques and the problems you faced, you can mitigate for the inevitable causal leaps or puzzling gaps.

Literary historians like to cite A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo (1934), but it’s a technique found in other genres, such as documentary theatre. For example, Ivna Žic’s play Blei (2017) sees a young woman enlist her friends to reconstruct her grandfather’s experience of the disputed Bleiburg repatriations of 1945, including video interviews, excerpts from books, and taped phone calls.

4. Make It Up

Plenty of would-be historical biographies contain made-up stories impossible to verify, such as the wholly speculative story of Shakespeare’s encounter with Elizabeth I at Kenilworth, enthusiastically mythologized by nineteenth-century biographers.

“A short time previous to this, when our poet was in his twelfth year, and in the summer of 1575, an event occurred which must have made a great impression on his mind; the visit of Queen Elizabeth to the magnificent Earl of Leicester, at Kenilworth Castle.” Nathan Drake, Shakespeare and His Times , 1838

Given biography’s tendency to improvise with anecdotes and dodgy causal connections, critics say it’s a kind of fiction masquerading as history.

You can make a virtue of a necessity by augmenting the historical sources, as in Edmund Morris’s Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999). Or else turn the practice of biography on its head by writing it as historical fiction, as in Hilary Mantel’s bestselling Wolf Hall (2009). Familiar representatives of the genre include the films Amadeus (1984) and Shakespeare in Love (1998), both inspired by long-standing myths associated with the lives of Mozart and Shakespeare.

If you aim to popularize a life or just to convey the atmosphere of the times, then so-called ‘biofiction’ allows you to indulge your imagination and free the life story from the strictures of the historical record.

5. Change the Received Wisdom

Myths and legends proliferating? Promise a glimpse behind the scenes and unmask your subject with a revisionist biography. Celebrities’ public personas – historical or contemporary – can easily deceive. By deconstructing appearances and identifying discourses, you can add academic sobriety to fiercely contested terrain, as in Sarah Churchwell’s The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004).

You can also throw caution to the winds with a thorough debunking. This is the kind of biography that likes to offend. You can do damage to the subject’s reputation (and possibly your own) by focusing on character flaws or allegations of a moral nature. You’ll need persuasive evidence and a biographee long since deceased – that or a good lawyer.

“No man knew better than Johnson in how many nameless and numberless actions behaviour consists: actions which can scarcely be reduced to rule, and which come under no description. Of these he retained so many very strange ones, that I suppose no one who saw his odd manner of gesticulating, much blamed or wondered at the good lady’s solicitude.” Hester Lynch Piozzi [Hester Thrale], Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson , 1786

6. The Life of the Mind

Select a scientist or a philosopher for your project and chances are you’ll be writing an ‘intellectual biography’.

Following the development of ideas across a life, biographies of great minds can play an important role in public understandings of science. You’ll also be looking at how institutions or cultural and historical contexts influenced your subject, how networks champion or resist particular ideas, and how even the best ones are greeted with scepticism.

Challenges include making the material comprehensible for a non-specialist and turning the genesis of complex thoughts into a compelling narrative. Feel free to do something inventive – Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter Ruth Padel wrote a biography of her forebear in poems.

“In the brown-black gloam of closing-time he meets his future colleague, a published entomologist. ‘I had no idea! So many thousand different beetles within ten miles of home!” Ruth Padel, Darwin: A Life in Poems , 2009

7. A Single Chapter

Very often, society values a given life for a single episode within it. In ‘History as a Poetess’ (1943), Stefan Zweig calls these history’s ‘heroic, poetic moments’.

Reducing a life course to a representative year or two may depart from the genre’s established conventions. But as James Shapiro has demonstrated in two books on Shakespeare, it gives you the chance to focus on what was most important in a life – or at least to make that case.

Collective biographies can do the same for groups. As in Lara Feigel’s The Love Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (2013), seeing how people’s lives interweave and diverge enables a more personal and unexpected take on familiar historical events.

[Title Image by  Ehud Neuhaus  via  Unsplash]

Edward Saunders

Edward Saunders was Deputy Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, Vienna until August 2017. His research interests are in biography and life writing, as well as urban history and cultural memory. Learn more about him on his website.

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How to Write a Biography

Biographies are big business. Whether in book form or Hollywood biopics, the lives of the famous and sometimes not-so-famous fascinate us.

While it’s true that most biographies are about people who are in the public eye, sometimes the subject is less well-known. Primarily, though, famous or not, the person who is written about has led an incredible life.

In this article, we will explain biography writing in detail for teachers and students so they can create their own.

While your students will most likely have a basic understanding of a biography, it’s worth taking a little time before they put pen to paper to tease out a crystal-clear definition of one.

What Is a Biography?

A biography is an account of someone’s life written by someone else . While there is a genre known as a fictional biography, for the most part, biographies are, by definition, nonfiction.

Generally speaking, biographies provide an account of the subject’s life from the earliest days of their childhood to the present day or their death if the subject is deceased.

The job of a biography is more than just to outline the bare facts of a person’s life.

Rather than just listing the basic details of their upbringing, hobbies, education, work, relationships, and death, a well-written biography should also paint a picture of the subject’s personality and experience of life.

A COMPLETE UNIT ON TEACHING BIOGRAPHIES

Teach your students to write AMAZING BIOGRAPHIES & AUTOBIOGRAPHIES using proven RESEARCH SKILLS and WRITING STRATEGIES .

• Understand the purpose of both forms of biography.
• Explore the language and perspective of both.
• Prompts and Challenges to engage students in writing a biography.
• Dedicated lessons for both forms of biography.
• Biographical Projects can expand students’ understanding of reading and writing a biography.
• A COMPLETE 82-PAGE UNIT – NO PREPARATION REQUIRED.

Features of a Biography

Before students begin writing a biography, they’ll need to have a firm grasp of the main features of Biography. An excellent way to determine how well they understand these essential elements is to ask them to compile a checklist like the one blow

At a minimum, their checklists should contain the items below. Be sure to help them fill in any gaps before moving on to the writing process.

The purpose of a biography is to provide an account of someone’s life.

Biography structure.

ORIENTATION (BEGINNING) Open your biography with a strong hook to grab the reader’s attention

SEQUENCING: In most cases, biographies are written in chronological order unless you are a very competent writer consciously trying to break from this trend.

COVER: childhood, upbringing, education, influences, accomplishments, relationships, etc. – everything that helps the reader to understand the person.

CONCLUSION: Wrap your biography up with some details about what the subject is doing now if they are still alive. If they have passed away, make mention of what impact they have made and what their legacy is or will be.

BIOGRAPHY FEATURES

LANGUAGE Use descriptive and figurative language that will paint images inside your audience’s minds as they read. Use time connectives to link events.

PERSPECTIVE Biographies are written from the third person’s perspective.

DETAILS: Give specific details about people, places, events, times, dates, etc. Reflect on how events shaped the subject. You might want to include some relevant photographs with captions. A timeline may also be of use depending upon your subject and what you are trying to convey to your audience.

TENSE Written in the past tense (though ending may shift to the present/future tense)

THE PROCESS OF WRITING A BIOGRAPHY

Like any form of writing, you will find it simple if you have a plan and follow it through. These steps will ensure you cover the essential bases of writing a biography essay.

Firstly, select a subject that inspires you. Someone whose life story resonates with you and whose contribution to society intrigues you. The next step is to conduct thorough research. Engage in extensive reading, explore various sources, watch documentaries, and glean all available information to provide a comprehensive account of the person’s life.

Creating an outline is essential to organize your thoughts and information. The outline should include the person’s early life, education, career, achievements, and any other significant events or contributions. It serves as a map for the writing process, ensuring that all vital information is included.

Your biography should have an engaging introduction that captivates the reader’s attention and provides background information on the person you’re writing about. It should include a thesis statement that summarizes the main points of the biography.

Writing a biography in chronological order is crucial . You should begin with the person’s early life and move through their career and achievements. This approach provides clarity on how the person’s life unfolded and how they accomplished their goals.

A biography should be written in a narrative style , capturing the essence of the person’s life through vivid descriptions, anecdotes, and quotes. Avoid dry, factual writing and focus on creating a compelling narrative that engages the reader.

Adding personal insights and opinions can enhance the biography’s overall impact, providing a unique perspective on the person’s achievements, legacy, and impact on society.

Editing and proofreading are vital elements of the writing process. Thoroughly reviewing your biography ensures that the writing is clear, concise, and error-free. You can even request feedback from someone else to ensure that it is engaging and well-written.

Finally, including a bibliography at the end of your biography is essential. It gives credit to the sources that were used during research, such as books, articles, interviews, and websites.

Tips for Writing a Brilliant Biography

Biography writing tip #1: choose your subject wisely.

There are several points for students to reflect on when deciding on a subject for their biography. Let’s take a look at the most essential points to consider when deciding on the subject for a biography:

Interest: To produce a biography will require sustained writing from the student. That’s why students must choose their subject well. After all, a biography is an account of someone’s entire life to date. Students must ensure they choose a subject that will sustain their interest throughout the research, writing, and editing processes.

Merit: Closely related to the previous point, students must consider whether the subject merits the reader’s interest. Aside from pure labors of love, writing should be undertaken with the reader in mind. While producing a biography demands sustained writing from the author, it also demands sustained reading from the reader.

Therefore, students should ask themselves if their chosen subject has had a life worthy of the reader’s interest and the time they’d need to invest in reading their biography.

Information: Is there enough information available on the subject to fuel the writing of an entire biography? While it might be a tempting idea to write about a great-great-grandfather’s experience in the war. There would be enough interest there to sustain the author’s and the reader’s interest, but do you have enough access to information about their early childhood to do the subject justice in the form of a biography?

Biography Writing Tip #2: R esearch ! Research! Research!

While the chances are good that the student already knows quite a bit about the subject they’ve chosen. Chances are 100% that they’ll still need to undertake considerable research to write their biography.

As with many types of writing , research is an essential part of the planning process that shouldn’t be overlooked. If a student wishes to give as complete an account of their subject’s life as possible, they’ll need to put in the time at the research stage.

An effective way to approach the research process is to:

1. Compile a chronological timeline of the central facts, dates, and events of the subject’s life

2. Compile detailed descriptions of the following personal traits:

•      Physical looks
•      Character traits
•      Values and beliefs

3. Compile some research questions based on different topics to provide a focus for the research:

• Childhood : Where and when were they born? Who were their parents? Who were the other family members? What education did they receive?
• Obstacles: What challenges did they have to overcome? How did these challenges shape them as individuals?
• Legacy: What impact did this person have on the world and/or the people around them?
• Dialogue & Quotes: Dialogue and quotations by and about the subject are a great way to bring color and life to a biography. Students should keep an eagle eye out for the gems that hide amid their sources.

As the student gets deeper into their research, new questions will arise that can further fuel the research process and help to shape the direction the biography will ultimately go in.

Likewise, during the research, themes will often begin to suggest themselves. Exploring these themes is essential to bring depth to biography, but we’ll discuss this later in this article.

Research Skills:

Researching for biography writing is an excellent way for students to hone their research skills in general. Developing good research skills is essential for future academic success. Students will have opportunities to learn how to:

• Gather relevant information
• Evaluate different information sources
• Select suitable information
• Organize information into a text.

Students will have access to print and online information sources, and, in some cases, they may also have access to people who knew or know the subject (e.g. biography of a family member).

These days, much of the research will likely take place online. It’s crucial, therefore, to provide your students with guidance on how to use the internet safely and evaluate online sources for reliability. This is the era of ‘ fake news ’ and misinformation after all!

COMPLETE TEACHING UNIT ON INTERNET RESEARCH SKILLS USING GOOGLE SEARCH

Teach your students ESSENTIAL SKILLS OF THE INFORMATION ERA to become expert DIGITAL RESEARCHERS.

⭐How to correctly ask questions to search engines on all devices.

⭐ How to filter and refine your results to find exactly what you want every time.

⭐ Essential Research and critical thinking skills for students.

⭐ Plagiarism, Citing and acknowledging other people’s work.

⭐ How to query, synthesize and record your findings logically.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING Tip #3: Find Your Themes In Biography Writing

Though predominantly a nonfiction genre, the story still plays a significant role in good biography writing. The skills of characterization and plot structuring are transferable here. And, just like in fiction, exploring themes in a biographical work helps connect the personal to the universal. Of course, these shouldn’t be forced; this will make the work seem contrived, and the reader may lose faith in the truthfulness of the account. A biographer needs to gain and maintain the trust of the reader.

Fortunately, themes shouldn’t need to be forced. A life well-lived is full of meaning, and the themes the student writer is looking for will emerge effortlessly from the actions and events of the subject’s life. It’s just a case of learning how to spot them.

One way to identify the themes in a life is to look for recurring events or situations in a person’s life. These should be apparent from the research completed previously. The students should seek to identify these patterns that emerge in the subject’s life. For example, perhaps they’ve had to overcome various obstacles throughout different periods of their life. In that case, the theme of overcoming adversity is present and has been identified.

Usually, a biography has several themes running throughout, so be sure your students work to identify more than one theme in their subject’s life.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING Tip: #4 Put Something of Yourself into the Writing

While the defining feature of a biography is that it gives an account of a person’s life, students must understand that this is not all a biography does. Relating the facts and details of a subject’s life is not enough. The student biographer should not be afraid to share their thoughts and feelings with the reader throughout their account of their subject’s life.

The student can weave some of their personality into the fabric of the text by providing commentary and opinion as they relate the events of the person’s life and the wider social context at the time. Unlike the detached and objective approach we’d expect to find in a history textbook, in a biography, student-writers should communicate their enthusiasm for their subject in their writing.

This makes for a more intimate experience for the reader, as they get a sense of getting to know the author and the subject they are writing about.

Student Examples of Biography Writing

• Year 5 Example
• Year 7 Example
• Year 9 Example

“The Rock ‘n’ Roll King: Elvis Presley”

Elvis Aaron Presley, born on January 8, 1935, was an amazing singer and actor known as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Even though he’s been dead for nearly 50 years, I can’t help but be fascinated by his incredible life!

Elvis grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, in a tiny house with his parents and twin brother. His family didn’t have much money, but they shared a love for music. Little did they know Elvis would become a music legend!

When he was only 11 years old, Elvis got his first guitar. He taught himself to play and loved singing gospel songs. As he got older, he started combining different music styles like country, blues, and gospel to create a whole new sound – that’s Rock ‘n’ Roll!

In 1954, at the age of 19, Elvis recorded his first song, “That’s All Right.” People couldn’t believe how unique and exciting his music was. His famous hip-swinging dance moves also made him a sensation!

Elvis didn’t just rock the music scene; he also starred in movies like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock.” But fame came with challenges. Despite facing ups and downs, Elvis kept spreading happiness through his music.

Tragically, Elvis passed away in 1977, but his music and charisma live on. Even today, people worldwide still enjoy his songs like “Hound Dog” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Elvis Presley’s legacy as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll will live forever.

Long Live the King: I wish I’d seen him.

Elvis Presley, the Rock ‘n’ Roll legend born on January 8, 1935, is a captivating figure that even a modern-day teen like me can’t help but admire. As I delve into his life, I wish I could have experienced the magic of his live performances.

Growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis faced challenges but found solace in music. At 11, he got his first guitar, a symbol of his journey into the world of sound. His fusion of gospel, country, and blues into Rock ‘n’ Roll became a cultural phenomenon.

The thought of being in the audience during his early performances, especially when he recorded “That’s All Right” at 19, sends shivers down my spine. Imagining the crowd’s uproar and feeling the revolutionary energy of that moment is a dream I wish I could have lived.

Elvis wasn’t just a musical prodigy; he was a dynamic performer. His dance moves, the embodiment of rebellion, and his roles in films like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock” made him a true icon.

After watching him on YouTube, I can’t help but feel a little sad that I’ll never witness the King’s live performances. The idea of swaying to “Hound Dog” or being enchanted by “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in person is a missed opportunity. Elvis may have left us in 1977, but he was the king of rock n’ roll. Long live the King!

Elvis Presley: A Teen’s Take on the Rock ‘n’ Roll Icon”

Elvis Presley, born January 8, 1935, was a revolutionary force in the music world, earning his title as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Exploring his life, even as a 16-year-old today, I’m captivated by the impact he made.

Hailing from Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis grew up in humble beginnings, surrounded by the love of his parents and twin brother. It’s inspiring to think that, despite financial challenges, this young man would redefine the music scene.

At 11, Elvis got his first guitar, sparking a self-taught journey into music. His early gospel influences evolved into a unique fusion of country, blues, and gospel, creating the electrifying genre of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In 1954, at only 19, he recorded “That’s All Right,” marking the birth of a musical legend.

Elvis wasn’t just a musical innovator; he was a cultural phenomenon. His rebellious dance moves and magnetic stage presence challenged the norms. He transitioned seamlessly into acting, starring in iconic films like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock.”

However, fame came at a cost, and Elvis faced personal struggles. Despite the challenges, his music continued to resonate. Even now, classics like “Hound Dog” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” transcend generations.

Elvis Presley’s impact on music and culture is undeniable. He was known for his unique voice, charismatic persona, and electrifying performances. He sold over one billion records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling solo artists in history. He received numerous awards throughout his career, including three Grammy Awards and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Elvis’s influence can still be seen in today’s music. Many contemporary artists, such as Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Justin Timberlake, have cited Elvis as an inspiration. His music continues to be featured in movies, TV shows, and commercials.

Elvis left us in 1977, but his legacy lives on. I appreciate his breaking barriers and fearlessly embracing his artistic vision. Elvis Presley’s impact on music and culture is timeless, a testament to the enduring power of his artistry. His music has inspired generations and will continue to do so for many years to come.

Teaching Resources

Use our resources and tools to improve your student’s writing skills through proven teaching strategies.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING TEACHING IDEAS AND LESSONS

We have compiled a sequence of biography-related lessons or teaching ideas that you can follow as you please. They are straightforward enough for most students to follow without further instruction.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 1:

This session aims to give students a broader understanding of what makes a good biography.

Once your students have compiled a comprehensive checklist of the main features of a biography, allow them to use it to assess some biographies from your school library or on the internet using the feature checklist.

When students have assessed a selection of biographies, take some time as a class to discuss them. You can base the discussion around the following prompts:

• Which biographies covered all the criteria from their checklist?
• Which biographies didn’t?
• Which biography was the most readable in terms of structure?
• Which biography do you think was the least well-structured? How would you improve this?

Looking at how other writers have interpreted the form will help students internalize the necessary criteria before attempting to produce a biography. Once students have a clear understanding of the main features of the biography, they’re ready to begin work on writing a biography.

When the time does come to put pen to paper, be sure they’re armed with the following top tips to help ensure they’re as well prepared as possible.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 2:

This session aims to guide students through the process of selecting the perfect biography subject.

Instruct students to draw up a shortlist of three potential subjects for the biography they’ll write.

Using the three criteria mentioned in the writing guide (Interest, Merit, and Information), students award each potential subject a mark out of 5 for each of the criteria. In this manner, students can select the most suitable subject for their biography.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 3:

This session aims to get students into the researching phase and then prioritise events and organise them chronologically.

Students begin by making a timeline of their subject’s life, starting with their birth and ending with their death or the present day. If the student has yet to make a final decision on the subject of their biography, a family member will often serve well for this exercise as a practice exercise.

Students should research and gather the key events of the person’s life, covering each period of their life from when they were a baby, through childhood and adolescence, right up to adulthood and old age. They should then organize these onto a timeline. Students can include photographs with captions if they have them.

They can present these to the class when they have finished their timelines.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 4:

Instruct students to look over their timeline, notes, and other research. Challenge them to identify three patterns that repeat throughout the subject’s life and sort all the related events and incidents into specific categories.

Students should then label each category with a single word. This is the thematic concept or the broad general underlying idea. After that, students should write a sentence or two expressing what the subject’s life ‘says’ about that concept.

This is known as the thematic statement . With the thematic concepts and thematic statements identified, the student now has some substantial ideas to explore that will help bring more profound meaning and wider resonance to their biography.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 5:

Instruct students to write a short objective account of an event in their own life. They can write about anyone from their past. It needn’t be more than a couple of paragraphs, but the writing should be strictly factual, focusing only on the objective details of what happened.

Once they have completed this, it’s time to rewrite the paragraph, but they should include some opinion and personal commentary this time.

The student here aims to inject some color and personality into their writing, to transform a detached, factual account into a warm, engaging story.

Get our FREE Biography Writing Graphic Organizer

Use this valuable tool in the research and writing phases to keep your students on track and engaged.

WRITING CHECKLIST & RUBRIC BUNDLE

To Conclude

By this stage, your students should have an excellent technical overview of a biography’s essential elements.

They should be able to choose their subject in light of how interesting and worthy they are, as well as give consideration to the availability of information out there. They should be able to research effectively and identify emerging themes in their research notes. And finally, they should be able to bring some of their personality and uniqueness into their retelling of the life of another.

Remember that writing a biography is not only a great way to develop a student’s writing skills; it can be used in almost all curriculum areas. For example, to find out more about a historical figure in History, to investigate scientific contributions to Science, or to celebrate a hero from everyday life.

Biography is an excellent genre for students to develop their writing skills and to find inspiration in the lives of others in the world around them.

HOW TO WRITE A BIOGRAPHY TUTORIAL VIDEO

OTHER GREAT ARTICLES RELATED TO BIOGRAPHY WRITING

How to write an Autobiography

How to Write a Historical Recount Text

15 Awesome Recount & Personal Narrative Topics

Personal Narrative Writing Guide

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• Knowledge Base
• Academic writing

What Is Academic Writing? | Dos and Don’ts for Students

Academic writing is a formal style of writing used in universities and scholarly publications. You’ll encounter it in journal articles and books on academic topics, and you’ll be expected to write your essays , research papers , and dissertation in academic style.

Academic writing follows the same writing process as other types of texts, but it has specific conventions in terms of content, structure and style.

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Table of contents

Types of academic writing, academic writing is…, academic writing is not…, useful tools for academic writing, academic writing checklist.

Academics mostly write texts intended for publication, such as journal articles, reports, books, and chapters in edited collections. For students, the most common types of academic writing assignments are listed below.

Different fields of study have different priorities in terms of the writing they produce. For example, in scientific writing it’s crucial to clearly and accurately report methods and results; in the humanities, the focus is on constructing convincing arguments through the use of textual evidence. However, most academic writing shares certain key principles intended to help convey information as effectively as possible.

Whether your goal is to pass your degree, apply to graduate school , or build an academic career, effective writing is an essential skill.

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Formal and unbiased

Academic writing aims to convey information in an impartial way. The goal is to base arguments on the evidence under consideration, not the author’s preconceptions. All claims should be supported with relevant evidence, not just asserted.

To avoid bias, it’s important to represent the work of other researchers and the results of your own research fairly and accurately. This means clearly outlining your methodology  and being honest about the limitations of your research.

The formal style used in academic writing ensures that research is presented consistently across different texts, so that studies can be objectively assessed and compared with other research.

Because of this, it’s important to strike the right tone with your language choices. Avoid informal language , including slang, contractions , clichés, and conversational phrases:

• Also , a lot of the findings are a little unreliable.
• Moreover , many of the findings are somewhat unreliable.

Clear and precise

It’s important to use clear and precise language to ensure that your reader knows exactly what you mean. This means being as specific as possible and avoiding vague language :

• People have been interested in this thing for a long time .
• Researchers have been interested in this phenomenon for at least 10 years .

Avoid hedging your claims with words like “perhaps,” as this can give the impression that you lack confidence in your arguments. Reflect on your word choice to ensure it accurately and directly conveys your meaning:

• This could perhaps suggest that…
• This suggests that…

Specialist language or jargon is common and often necessary in academic writing, which generally targets an audience of other academics in related fields.

However, jargon should be used to make your writing more concise and accurate, not to make it more complicated. A specialist term should be used when:

• It conveys information more precisely than a comparable non-specialist term.
• Your reader is likely to be familiar with the term.
• The term is commonly used by other researchers in your field.

The best way to familiarize yourself with the kind of jargon used in your field is to read papers by other researchers and pay attention to their language.

Focused and well structured

An academic text is not just a collection of ideas about a topic—it needs to have a clear purpose. Start with a relevant research question or thesis statement , and use it to develop a focused argument. Only include information that is relevant to your overall purpose.

A coherent structure is crucial to organize your ideas. Pay attention to structure at three levels: the structure of the whole text, paragraph structure, and sentence structure.

Well sourced

Academic writing uses sources to support its claims. Sources are other texts (or media objects like photographs or films) that the author analyzes or uses as evidence. Many of your sources will be written by other academics; academic writing is collaborative and builds on previous research.

It’s important to consider which sources are credible and appropriate to use in academic writing. For example, citing Wikipedia is typically discouraged. Don’t rely on websites for information; instead, use academic databases and your university library to find credible sources.

You must always cite your sources in academic writing. This means acknowledging whenever you quote or paraphrase someone else’s work by including a citation in the text and a reference list at the end.

There are many different citation styles with different rules. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago . Make sure to consistently follow whatever style your institution requires. If you don’t cite correctly, you may get in trouble for plagiarism . A good plagiarism checker can help you catch any issues before it’s too late.

You can easily create accurate citations in APA or MLA style using our Citation Generators.

APA Citation Generator MLA Citation Generator

Correct and consistent

As well as following the rules of grammar, punctuation, and citation, it’s important to consistently apply stylistic conventions regarding:

• How to write numbers
• Introducing abbreviations
• Using verb tenses in different sections
• Capitalization of terms and headings
• Spelling and punctuation differences between UK and US English

In some cases there are several acceptable approaches that you can choose between—the most important thing is to apply the same rules consistently and to carefully proofread your text before you submit. If you don’t feel confident in your own proofreading abilities, you can get help from Scribbr’s professional proofreading services or Grammar Checker .

Academic writing generally tries to avoid being too personal. Information about the author may come in at some points—for example in the acknowledgements or in a personal reflection—but for the most part the text should focus on the research itself.

Always avoid addressing the reader directly with the second-person pronoun “you.” Use the impersonal pronoun “one” or an alternate phrasing instead for generalizations:

• As a teacher, you must treat your students fairly.
• As a teacher, one must treat one’s students fairly.
• Teachers must treat their students fairly.

The use of the first-person pronoun “I” used to be similarly discouraged in academic writing, but it is increasingly accepted in many fields. If you’re unsure whether to use the first person, pay attention to conventions in your field or ask your instructor.

When you refer to yourself, it should be for good reason. You can position yourself and describe what you did during the research, but avoid arbitrarily inserting your personal thoughts and feelings:

• In my opinion…
• I think that…
• I like/dislike…
• I conducted interviews with…
• I argue that…
• I hope to achieve…

Long-winded

Many students think their writing isn’t academic unless it’s over-complicated and long-winded. This isn’t a good approach—instead, aim to be as concise and direct as possible.

If a term can be cut or replaced with a more straightforward one without affecting your meaning, it should be. Avoid redundant phrasings in your text, and try replacing phrasal verbs with their one-word equivalents where possible:

• Interest in this phenomenon carried on in the year 2018 .
• Interest in this phenomenon continued in 2018 .

Repetition is a part of academic writing—for example, summarizing earlier information in the conclusion—but it’s important to avoid unnecessary repetition. Make sure that none of your sentences are repeating a point you’ve already made in different words.

Emotive and grandiose

An academic text is not the same thing as a literary, journalistic, or marketing text. Though you’re still trying to be persuasive, a lot of techniques from these styles are not appropriate in an academic context. Specifically, you should avoid appeals to emotion and inflated claims.

Though you may be writing about a topic that’s sensitive or important to you, the point of academic writing is to clearly communicate ideas, information, and arguments, not to inspire an emotional response. Avoid using emotive or subjective language :

• This horrible tragedy was obviously one of the worst catastrophes in construction history.
• The injury and mortality rates of this accident were among the highest in construction history.

Students are sometimes tempted to make the case for their topic with exaggerated , unsupported claims and flowery language. Stick to specific, grounded arguments that you can support with evidence, and don’t overstate your point:

• Charles Dickens is the greatest writer of the Victorian period, and his influence on all subsequent literature is enormous.
• Charles Dickens is one of the best-known writers of the Victorian period and has had a significant influence on the development of the English novel.

There are a a lot of writing tools that will make your writing process faster and easier. We’ll highlight three of them below.

Paraphrasing tool

AI writing tools like ChatGPT and a paraphrasing tool can help you rewrite text so that your ideas are clearer, you don’t repeat yourself, and your writing has a consistent tone.

They can also help you write more clearly about sources without having to quote them directly. Be warned, though: it’s still crucial to give credit to all sources in the right way to prevent plagiarism .

Grammar checker

Writing tools that scan your text for punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. When it detects a mistake the grammar checke r will give instant feedback and suggest corrections. Helping you write clearly and avoid common mistakes .

You can use a summarizer if you want to condense text into its most important and useful ideas. With a summarizer tool, you can make it easier to understand complicated sources. You can also use the tool to make your research question clearer and summarize your main argument.

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:

• Academic style
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• Style consistency

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Use the checklist below to assess whether you have followed the rules of effective academic writing.

• Checklist: Academic writing

I avoid informal terms and contractions .

I avoid second-person pronouns (“you”).

I avoid emotive or exaggerated language.

I avoid redundant words and phrases.

I avoid unnecessary jargon and define terms where needed.

I present information as precisely and accurately as possible.

I use appropriate transitions to show the connections between my ideas.

My text is logically organized using paragraphs .

Each paragraph is focused on a single idea, expressed in a clear topic sentence .

Every part of the text relates to my central thesis or research question .

I support my claims with evidence.

I use the appropriate verb tenses in each section.

I consistently use either UK or US English .

I format numbers consistently.

I cite my sources using a consistent citation style .

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How to Write a Biography Essay and Get an A+

03 July, 2020

7 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

Got a chance to write about your idol but need help with realization? Read our article to know the secrets of effective biography essay writing. Whoever you decide to write a biography essay about, don’t try to include random information at once. The person you describe would not like it. Instead, read our article about how to write a biography essay correctly and, more importantly, take pleasure in composing it. We’ll share some smart tips and tricks that you’ll find particularly useful for your writing.

What is a biographical essay?

Some tend to mistakenly attribute biographical essay to the process of writing about themselves. But actually, biography definition has nothing to do with you. It’s more about telling the engaging story about a person’s life. This individual can be anyone: a famous historical figure, a well-known actor, politician, dancer, musician, artist, writer, inventor – you get the point. Such task sounds intriguing and interesting, and indeed it is. A biographical essay is a great chance to dilute simple academic tasks with a pinch of new article full of interesting facts and opinions.

Biography essay outline

Before writing a biography essay, it’s important to pay attention to essay structure and build up a biography outline. An outline is generally a schematic plan that helps to organize biography essays in accordance with the writer’s preference. In this, the primary task is to create a list of the most significant facts you’ll want to develop in the essay. The easiest way of arranging an outline is to add a numbered list indicating the main points, and a list of sub-points marked with bullets. Also, don’t forget to include a biography thesis statement that’ll sum up the main idea of your essay in one sentence.

How to start a biography essay?

Before writing, you first need to understand what to include in a biography essay. An eloquent biography essay always starts with the introduction of a chosen person. The initial step of writing it involves the inclusion of such information as the person’s name, date of their birth, and the place they were born in. Of course, it’s not a uniform set of data necessary for this part. You can take the situation in your hands and write about some cultural or historical background surrounding one’s birthplace or the day they were born. Adding such information to the introductory part will help to create some context by connecting you and readers closer to the described character and broadening the common knowledge with more absorbing facts.

How to write a biography essay about someone else?

When people ask how to write a biography paper, the only thing they think of is a random flow of ideas about someone’s life. In fact, writing a biography paper is more complicated. The section following the introduction is devoted to life description. Here, you’ll need to feature early life and childhood of a chosen person. This part should cover general information about their parents, and divert readers’ attention to some facts related to their origin, education, and relationship status. Next, focus more on education and place where the person grew up. In this section, include more detailed information about the critical moments of their childhood life, like the name of the school they studied in or the point of moving to another city or town. Perhaps there are more facts worthy of note, such as family problems or health issues that revolved around one’s childhood. If there are such, include them as well.

The second section of your biographical essay will tell readers about someone’s adulthood. Depending on the person, this piece of story can be outlined differently. For example, you can write about their university or college life, or indicate their first job. The point here is to chronologically depict a period of moving from childhood to adult life. Then, talk about the formation of a person’s career path, starting with the first working experience and ending with the remarkable moment of revealing talents and skills that shaped their life. In the next paragraph, mention the person’s relationship during their adulthood. If applicable, describe how someone special helped them to become successful or motivated them throughout their career. Another significant aspect in this section has to do with the person’s success, in which readers could know about their notable accomplishments and achievements.

The final section of a biography essay will touch the person’s current or later life. If they are alive, include the overlook of their place of living and write about their activities. You can also add such information as to their current projects or career plans, along with other meaningful facts about their life.

If the person you’re writing about is no longer living, emphasize on the brightest moments at the sunset of their life. Mention the definitive moments and aspects, and write about the cause of their deaths.

Other tips on writing a biography

If you want your biography essay to leave a great impact on readers, don’t conclude it with a simple explanation of why this or that person died and what their latest works were. This is only factual information which brings no specific value to your essay and, more importantly, doesn’t breathe life into it. To wrap up your essay content with a memorable grabber, include a couple of sentences in which write about the person’s legacy. That is, add the opinion of why this individual’s activity became an exceptional contribution to the world’s history, and why they have changed some aspects of their field.

Biography essay writing is a responsible task that aims at showing a well-acclaimed person from the best light. Therefore, you need to write about one’s life as you would about your mother – with maximum details and showing respect for that person. So follow our advice to compose an A+ biography essay that you and your audience will enjoy reading.

Note that our company provides academic writing help. You can buy a Biography essay written from scratch by our  essay writer .

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Students obtaining degrees in fine art and art & design programs most commonly need to write a paper on art topics. However, this subject is becoming more popular in educational institutions for expanding students’ horizons. Thus, both groups of receivers of education: those who are into arts and those who only get acquainted with art […]

Mandy Pinheiro Receives Belamarich Dissertation Writing Award

Mandy’s research focuses on understanding how noncodi ng RNAs (ncRNAs) may be central to the coordination of metabolism and differentiation in skeletal muscle. The regulation of gene expression during cell state transitions is a complex and tightly controlled molecular process. One potential central regulator of myogenesis is the Dlk1-Dio3 ncRNA locus, the largest known mammalian cluster of ncRNAs. She used mouse skeletal muscle cells as a model system to investigate how this ncRNA cluster may coordinate metabolic and epigenetic changes that occur when proliferating myoblasts differentiate into mature myotubes.

Congratulations, Mandy!

• lecturer writing resources center

Lecturer - Writing Resources Center

COMPANY:      Case Western Reserve University

JOB TITLE:        Lecturer

HOURS:             Full-time

LOCATION:       11112 Bellflower Road, Cleveland, OH 44106

DUTIES: Designing and leading first-year Academic Inquiry Seminars (offered both Fall and Spring semesters) and consulting with students in the Writing Resource Center. Responsibilities may also include designing and leading other writing-intensive seminars; creative writing, professional/technical or scientific communication courses; and/or other undergraduate courses. Opportunities for writing program administrative and assessment activities are available and count in the teaching load. Responsible for a teaching load equivalent to six courses over the academic year (does not include summer), which may include a mix of classroom teaching, WRC consulting, and administrative activities. FSAE 100 (AIAE 100) Course description: University level reading, writing, and public speaking requirements at Case Western Reserve FSAE 100 (AIAE 100) Case Western Reserve University offers international students and English language learners the opportunity to improve reading, writing, and language skills during their first semester by placing them in a special two-semester Academic Inquiry Seminar sequence. Based on your Directed Self-Placement responses, you will take AIAE 100: Academic English in your first semester and AIQS 120: Academic Inquiry Seminar in your second semester. Once this two-semester sequence is completed, you will have completed your Academic Inquiry Seminar requirement. FSCC 100 (AIQS 120) Course description: This course, specifically designed for non-native speakers of English, develops the habits of mind and writing/communication processes that characterize academic discourse. Special emphasis is given to critical reading and writing in academic English by focusing on rhetorical and linguistic concerns specific to non-native speakers of English. Students engage with questions and topics from multiple perspectives, and they establish effective writing processes (including planning, drafting, responding to feedback, revising, reflecting, and self-assessing) as well as language acquisition habits.

REQUIREMENTS: PhD in English, Writing Studies, Education, or a related field of study, and three (3) years of experience as a Lecturer or a related occupation involving College teaching.

TO APPLY: Email resume to Kimberly Emmons at [email protected] and reference: Lecturer