How to Write a Biography
What is a biography?
A biography is simply a person’s story of his/her life. A biography can be just a couple of sentences long, or as long as a whole book. Biographies that are short, tell the basic facts of a person’s importance and life. Whereas, biographies that are a bit longer include basic information with a lot of details.
A biographical text interprets the events of a person’s life. It connects and elaborates on his achievements, deeds, aspirations, and life activities and practices. Typically, we write biographies about famous people and also about infamous people. People can write biographies about historical figures, but they can also write them about living public figures.
Biographies writers may use both primary sources such as diaries, letters, or newspapers and secondary sources such as other biographies, books…etc. They may write biographies in chronological order. Yet, some writers talk about achievements from the least to the most important.
To write a biography, you should:
- Choose the person you want to write about,
- Collect the basic facts about his/her life,
- Think about what parts of his/her life you want to write about,
- You might ask questions like:
- What makes this person interesting?
- In what way did they affect the world?
- Do they have qualities other people will be interested in?
- How did they overcome obstacles?
- Have they done any activities to inspire people?
- Do they achieve something through their books??
5. Do some research to find answers to these questions
6. Write your biography.
Here is an example of a biography. Read it to see how it is written and organized in terms of form.
retrieved from here
Writing a biography is not different from writing an essay. See how an essay is written, and how to write a good paragraph.
