1. 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.