How To Write A Biography Essay And Get An A+
As a high school or college student, you have probably written dozens, if not hundreds, of essays of all types. However, a biographical essay is nothing like you have written before. In fact, despite seeming relatively easy, the task of writing a biography essay can get very confusing to inexperienced students.
Instead of your ideas, a biography essay utilizes facts, but it takes a lot of research and writing skills to write a biography essay that will impress both your peers and your professor. Our essay writing service has prepared a detailed guide on how to write a good biography essay, and here is everything you need to know.
What Is a Biographical Essay?
Before you can find out how to write a biography essay, you need to learn the answer to the essential question: what is a biography essay? A biographical essay is a type of academic paper where the author tells the story of someone’s life.
In some ways, biographical essays are similar to other types of essays, especially narrative papers. They both tell a story that should captivate and inform the readers. However, a biographical essay focuses solely on the story of one person and often includes an analysis of the person’s personality, not just a list of significant events from the subject’s life story.
Typically, the biography essay format deals with the life story of another person. In some cases, you may be tasked with writing a biography about yourself. In that case, your paper will be called an autobiography essay, and it’s a common assignment in high school and during the college application process.
At first glance, a biography essay may seem like just another type of written assignments that you simply have to do for a good grade. However, a bibliography essay is actually a very important piece of writing that allows you to tell a story of another person’s greatness, significance, or vulnerability through his life events.
Biography Essay Outline
Even though a biographical essay is a unique form of writing, it still requires you to follow a specific format and structure. The biography essay outline helps you keep your thoughts in order and never miss a single significant fact or quote.
So, how to write a biography essay outline? Unless otherwise specified by your professor, you should follow the standard five-paragraph essay structure. It means that your biography essay outline will include the following chapters:
- Introduction
- Body paragraph #1
- Body paragraph #2
- Body paragraph #3
- Conclusion
Now that you know what is biography essay and how to create a good biography essay outline, it is time to finally find out how to write a biography essay. In this part of our guide, we will focus on a personal biography essay, or autobiography.
Introduction
Students are often wondering: how to start off a biography essay to make a good impression on the readers? The introduction is the first part of your paper the readers will encounter, and you should pay extra attention to what you write in this chapter.
How to write an introduction for a biography essay? Start with a hook — an attention-grabbing sentence that sets the tone for the paper. It can be a personal anecdote, a fact, or a quote from someone else describing you.
In the rest of the introduction, write a little about yourself without giving up any important facts — save those for the upcoming chapters of the essay. Finish the introduction with a thesis statement, where you should describe the essence of your biography essay.
Body paragraphs
If you went for the classic five-paragraph structure with your biography, you will have three body paragraphs. There is no standard way to distribute your biography between those three paragraphs, but since you are writing about yourself — a young person whose later years are still ahead of them — you can use the following structure:
- Body paragraph #1: Childhood
- Body paragraph #2: School years
- Body paragraph #3: Current situation
Since it’s a personal essay, you probably won’t use too much research to support your claims, which will be based on your own life. However, you should carefully choose the wording, not to exaggerate your achievements. Be as close to your own life events as possible.
Conclusion
A conclusion is an essential part of any essay, and it’s equally true for a biography essay. Since you are retelling your own life story, and it’s difficult to assess your contribution to the society simply because you are only at the beginning of your own career, you should write about the way your life until this point impacted your development as a person.
How to Write a Biography Essay About Someone Else?
Our essay service has already covered how to write a personal biography essay, but in most cases, you will be tasked with writing a biography essay about a different person — usually, someone famous and significant in their own field. This person can be dead or alive, but they will likely have a rich biography that is relatively easy to write about.
The key to writing a strong biography essay is to rely strictly on facts, not on fiction. It doesn’t mean that you should simply list the facts from the person’s life story without any opinions of your own, but those opinions and assumptions must always be based on the official statements from the person’s biography.
Additional Tips on Writing a Biography
Wondering how to write a biography essay to make it absolutely flawless? Check out these extra writing tips from our expert team of authors that specialize in essay writing in the United States:
- Even though that might seem obvious, you should always use a chronological order when listing the events in a biography essay. There are a few situations where a reverse chronological order also works, but a standard chronological order is easier for the readers to comprehend.
- Not every event from the person’s life is worth mentioning in a biography essay. Before beginning to writing your essay, you need to study the person’s biography in detail. Then, write down the events and experiences that influenced their life and achievements, leaving behind the more insignificant facts.
- When you are writing a biography essay, your job is to give an impartial insight into the life of your subject and assess their contribution to the world. Your readers don’t want to see any generalizations or your own opinions, especially if they are negative — there are other genres of writing where you can do that.
Use Our Biography Essay Examples for Guidance
Wise people say that a person is molded by all the positive and negative experiences they have had throughout their lifetime. When looking back at the relatively short lifetime I have, I can surely say that it is absolutely true. My secure and smooth childhood years, followed by the turbulent schooltime, have finally made me a resilient person enrolling in college this year. With so many sweet memories and life lessons behind me, I feel ready for a new page in my life.
The biography of a 19-year-old is probably not that long, so I will start with the earliest memories I have. My childhood was serene and enjoyable, as I lived on a farm with my loving parents and siblings. We had so much fun outdoors, playing with the domestic animals and reaping the fruits of nature in the nearby forest. In the evening, we used to sit down at a large table, having dinner, laughing, and discussing the joys and sorrows of the day. My mother dealt with our early education; she was a kind and patient person, so I never felt it was hard or demanding to master reading, writing, and math. Life was fun, and I never thought that something would change in the relaxed lifestyle we all had on our farm.
Yet, at the age of 6, I found out that we were moving to the nearby city, as my mother got sick and could not take care of the farm and three children with the previous ease and resilience. She needed medical care and rested most of the day, so my parents made a tough decision to sell the farm and purchase an apartment in Austin, where my two brothers and I went to the local public school. We understood that the decision was hard for parents, so we tried to cheer them up in every way, pretending that we were excited about the change. However, a public school was fundamentally different from the cozy and loving atmosphere of home studies, and the three of us soon realized the full depth of peer cruelty and indifference.
As we were coping with the hardship of fitting into the public schooling system, our mother was having her own battle with a chronic disease. She won it, but the cost was too high, and she never recovered fully to be an active and merry participant in our home routines. Thus, we concentrated on helping our father and not failing the GPA, finally making it to high school (though not without hardship).
Though I thought I would never study if I were given an option to choose, at present, I realize that college comes with a large number of unique benefits I cannot afford to miss. Looking at my elderly mother and father, whose happiest moments were on the family farm, I aim to study Agriculture and Biotechnology to connect my career with farming. I do believe that true happiness comes from human unity with nature, so my vocation is to preserve the land’s fertility and let it feed other people. Regardless of whether I will be able to buy a farm for myself and return to that sweet memory of family happiness, I want to make thousands of other households happy with well-established, working agricultural technologies and methods.
