Biography writing examples

Biography writing format
How to write biography in english
How to write a biography for students

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Telling a Life: Tips for Composing a Compelling Biography

by Louise Privette

People read biographies to learn more about people they admire or better understand the motivations of those they despise. A great biographer offers a glimpse into the lives of noteworthy individuals. Readers share the individual’s journey, experience their triumphs and failures, and gain insights into their own lives.

I recently wrote a friend’s biography. The task took longer than the return on my five-year certificate of deposit, and I faced some unique challenges while crafting his life story. Here are some lessons learned and tips for writing a captivating biography.

Choose a Subject Worth Knowing

Make sure their story passes the “so what?” test. Although many people lead honorable lives and are loved by those close to them, they may not have a story that the wider world will want to read. Whether writing about a historical figure, a famous person, or your next-door neighbor, make sure this person has a story worth telling.

Sylvia Nasar offers a relevant quote in A Beautiful Mind, the biogr

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Biography and Autobiography in the Teaching of History and Social Studies

I have been using biography and autobiography to teach history at Case Western Reserve University for the past ten years. I regularly teach a class called “Biography as History: Twentieth-Century World Leaders,” and occasionally I offer a class called “Medieval People” (the medieval period is really my field). Currently I am developing a new survey course in modern world history in which I anticipate extensive use of biographical and autobiographical materials. Quite clearly, I’m a believer.

Using biography in the classroom is both academically valid and a challenging way to encounter new worlds. For teachers, biography and autobiography provide initial entry to the study of periods of time and of places with which there may be little familiarity. For students, it is pleasurable, hardly like work, to learn history by reading the life stories of real people. It makes these people—whether they be monarchs, presidents, slaves, colonials, or their masters, prisoners of cons

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Writing Historical Biography

15 February 2015

"Here's my challenge," a history researcher wrote recently on social media. "How do I write a biography of someone from the 1700s with little direct documentation available?"

Oh, yeah! We all know that problem. It is a challenge, but it's doable. Successful historical biographers—after they conclude that they have already exhausted available records for their person-of-interest—usually take this approach:

Study every history of every type that has been written on the region—social, religious, military, economic, or whatever. If newspapers are available and have yielded no hits for their person, they read those papers anyway, every issue for the relevant time frame.
Rather than looking for a particular person, they use these sources to draw an understanding of the region. That understanding of what life was like, at the time and place, enables them to recreate their person's environment and to place their person—accurately and meaningfully—upon that stage of history. Whatever few personal details they had gleaned