HOW TO WRITE A BIOGRAPHY

A biography is, roughly speaking, the story of a real person’s life including his/her most relevant events. Here are some ideas to help you in the process:

1) Before writing the biography, find out different sources of information (the Internet, reference books, magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias, etc.)

2) Track down basic facts about the person you have to write about, such as: Date of birth/death, Family information, Place of origin, Educational background, Profession, etc.

3) Now think of more prominent events that shaped your subject's life, such as: Greatest accomplishments, Worst failure, Biggest obstacles overcome, Lasting contribution to the world, Prizes or special awards received, etc.

4) Organize your thoughts before starting writing. Think of that part of the person’s life you would like to highlight. Some useful questions can be: who?, what?, where?, why? and how?

5) Consider the time or space limit of your project because you will have to sum up the information on many occasions. If so, decide what to include or not.

6) Decide how to recount the person's life. Write an outline and fill in the details. This is the step in which you decide which events in the subject’s life are the important ones, and which ones you will focus on. There are different approaches like: Chronological, Flashbacks, Work, Accomplishments or events, etc.

7) When writing your text consider the following linguistic aspects:

• Generally speaking use verbs in the past tenses (past simple, past continunous, past perfect...) unless you want to use present tenses to bring the subject to the present time for special reasons

• The text will be mainly narrative and descriptive

• Use objective expressions and avoid opinions or subjective language

• Use more adjectives and adverbs for richer descriptions

• Use linkers to indicate time sequence, order, relations like cause and effect, etc.