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Definition of biography

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So You've Been Asked to Submit a Biography

In a library, the word biography refers both to a kind of book and to a section where books of that kind are found. Each biography tells the story of a real person's life. A biography may be about someone who lived long ago, recently, or even someone who is still living, though in the last case it must necessarily be incomplete. The term autobiography refers to a biography written by the person it's about. Autobiographies are of course also necessarily incomplete.

Sometimes biographies are significantly shorter than a book—something anyone who's been asked to submit a biography for, say, a conference or a community newsletter will be glad to know. Often the word in these contexts is shortened to bio , a term that can be both a synonym of biography and a term for what is actually a biographical sketch: a brief description of a person's life. These kinds of biographies—bios—vary, but many times they are only a few sentences long. Looking at bios that have been used in the same context can be a useful guide in determining what to put in your own.

Examples of biography in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'biography.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Late Greek biographia , from Greek bi- + -graphia -graphy

1665, in the meaning defined at sense 2

Dictionary Entries Near biography

biographize

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“Biography.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biography. Accessed 14 May. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of biography, more from merriam-webster on biography.

Nglish: Translation of biography for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of biography for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about biography

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Definition of biography noun from the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary

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Biography: A Very Short Introduction

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Biography: A Very Short Introduction looks at the origins and development of biographical writing. Why do certain people and historical events arouse so much interest? How can biographies be compared with history and works of fiction? Does a biography need to be true? Is it acceptable to omit or conceal things? Does the biographer need to personally know the subject? Must a biographer be subjective? This VSI considers the cultural and historical background of different types of biographies, looking at the factors that affect biographers and whether there are different strategies, ethics, and principles required for writing about one person compared to another.

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• Biography: A Very Short Introduction | Hermione Lee

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Meaning of biography in English

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• This biography offers a few glimpses of his life before he became famous .
• Her biography revealed that she was not as rich as everyone thought .
• The biography was a bit of a rush job .
• The biography is an attempt to uncover the inner man.
• The biography is woven from the many accounts which exist of things she did.
• exercise book
• novelistically
• young adult

biography | American Dictionary

• biographical

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A scripted speech or broadcast has been written before it is read or performed.

Varied and diverse (Talking about differences, Part 1)

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A Definitive Guide To Writing a Biography

• March 1, 2022
• 12 Comments

Writing a biography is a chronological account of a person’s life, written by another person. Sometimes, the description only includes significant events in your life; while others include everything from childhood to death. Although there is no absolute standard regarding the length of a biography writing , most are at least several thousand words. It is a great choice if you have little to no experience with creating content, but are interested in trying it out. 

The best way to write a biography begins with finding some interesting facts about yourself that you can share. The best biographies have real facts that have inspired stories attached to them. 

Introduction to a Biography Writing: How is it different from an Autobiography?

A biography writing , or simply a bio, is a detailed description of a person’s life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person’s experience of these life events.  

Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject’s life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject’s personality. 

• Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also portray a person’s life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing.  
• From literature to film, works in diverse media form the genre known as biography.  
• An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and at times, participation of a subject or a subject’s heirs.  
• Whereas an autobiography is written by the person themselves, sometimes with the assistance of a collaborator or ghostwriter. 

Formulate your Thesis Statement:

A thesis statement is a sentence that makes an assertion about a topic and predicts how the topic will be developed.  

• It does not simply announce a topic: it says something about the topic.  
• The thesis statement is usually just one sentence long, but it might be longer—even a whole paragraph—usually, if you’re writing a large content like a Biography .   
• A good thesis statement makes a debatable point, meaning a point someone might disagree with and argue against.  
• It also serves as a guide to remind the writer of what he/she should write about and consult when lost regarding the content’s focus. 

Construct a Strong Timeline of the Person’s Life:

There are lots of ways to develop a perfect timeline. Either you can do it trying a simple method, or you can improvise it even better by adding some essence to it.  

If you decide to go for a simple arena, here’s how you can do it: 

Include the dates of all events in the person’s life put together descriptions of each. 

• Birth 
• Childhood 
• Education 
• Career highlights 
• Personal life 
• Death 

For cultivating the best results, improvise your points with these:

• Give the reader an idea of what your subject is like as a person. Does he/she enjoy socializing with other people? What are his/her likes and dislikes? 
• What are the major events that happened in his/her life? (This could be related to their family, personal life, career, etc.) 
• Create a timeline of the person’s life. This will help you organize your thoughts and decide what information should go into your biography writing . 
• Give examples of how the subject’s past experiences have shaped him or her into the person they are today.
• Try to include quotes from your subject throughout the biography writing.   

Choose your method of writing the Biography:

There are different methods of writing a biography –  

• One is to write in chronological order. This method has been used since the days of Herodotus and Plutarch . In this type of biography, you would start with the person’s birth and write about his life in order from that point on.
• A second way to write a biography is to focus on a person’s key accomplishments in an order that emphasizes their importance, even if the events didn’t happen that way in real life.  
• Other biographies can be written from a psychological perspective, which focuses on internal motivation, or a historical perspective that uses background events as an important part of the story.  
• A final way to write a biography is to focus on one specific event or aspect of someone’s life. 

Writing the First Draft of Biography:  

To write your first draft, you will need to: 

• Avoid editing as you go. Writing is a process, and it’s hard to get it right the first time. When you edit as you go, you slow yourself down. Worse yet, you might stop altogether because you’re never happy with what you’ve written.  
• To get a first draft done quickly, focus on quantity over quality. Write fast and edit later. 
• Consider talking out loud instead of writing. It’s easier to use your natural voice when spoken words are not transcribed verbatim.  
• Write in bursts with short breaks in between. Sitting down for an hour or more is difficult for many people, but if you take frequent breaks. Every 25 minutes–you’ll be able to write for longer periods of time without feeling drained or exhausted from the activity.  

Conclude with Impact:  

Now that you’ve made your case, it’s time to wrap it up with a conclusion that seals the deal. This final section can be anywhere from three sentences to three paragraphs, but it should wrap up the biography writing nicely and leave a lasting impression on your readers. 

A great way to do this is to include one or two quotes from people who were impacted by the person you are writing about. You could also end with a memorable quote from the person or some type of legacy statement that highlights their most notable achievements. 

Writ e a biography has more to do with being able to get into the right mindset of your subject than writing skills. However, the key thing is being honest. In other words, it’s not about trying to become someone you’re not (even if that also means being a bit creative). Lastly, write like you speak and let the words flow. 

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Send your query, 12 thoughts on “a definitive guide to writing a biography”.

Very nice blog. Now I can start writing a biography of my personal life after reading this blog. Thanks 👍 for sharing this blog.

Thanks for sharing this blog. I have just started my career in Biography writing and I know this blog will help me a lot and one day I will become professional biography writer.

The blog is really amazing but I have a question that can anyone write their own biography?

I have a question that I want to ask after reading this blog, are biographies similar to memoirs?

The information given in this blog is really amazing 👌👌👌. Thanks for sharing this blog.

Wow, so can I get a biography written for myself? What kind of help can I get if I wanna make a short movie of my life? Is that possible?

My friend wants to get a help in writing a biography for his father. I’m sure this blog will help him a lot.

Very amazing blog and nicely written. The most engaging part of this blog is that we can start a biography without any doubt because most of people get confused from where should they start to write a biography.

Thankyou so much for this blog. I’m a student and i had to write a biography of few scientist but i didn’t know how to start. It really helped me a lot.

I appreciate your work that how easily you have explained it. It would definitely have help everyone in writing a biography, how to start and the way of writing.

I’ve taken away so many valuable tips from your post. Your tips are fantastic!

Thankyou so much for the feedback, it means so much to us and we aspire to bring you more of them. Read more on ( link )

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QuickTips: The Blog @ Evidence Explained

Writing Historical Biography

15 February 2015

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 from their focused study should enable them to determine the strata of society to which their person belonged and the kind of role their person would have played. That is something they can write about, and putting a person into historical context is an essential part of biography.
• Presumably their focused research on that person included his or her "FAN Club ," 1 in which case some of the elusive person's friends, associates, or neighbors will appear in those newspapers or general histories. Their activities offer a framework for better understanding why that person-of-interest did or did not participate in the same events as their associates. So,  these biographers ask: Have I taken my research on these associates beyond the basic records? Have I combed online catalogs of manuscript sources to determine whether the neighbors, pastors, or other "unofficial record keepers" of the region left diaries or letters that might provide more evidence for the elusive person's life?
• Successful biographers, when they digest those general histories, also study them for their sources. Most modern works will have reference notes or bibliographies (a general list of sources used). Many olders ones don't (and many modern ones are incomplete). Therefore, historical biographers watch for instances in which sources are generically mentioned in the text and compile their own worklist of new sources to pursue. Doing so almost always generates new information on the low-key, limelight-shunning person-of-interest—or, at the least, a better understanding of what he or she would have done and why.

E's QuickSheet series, The Historical Biographer's Guide to ...,  offers many other ideas.

     1. For more on this principle, see Elizabeth Shown Mills, "QuickLesson 11: Identity Problems & the FAN Principle," Evidence Explained (https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/quicklesson-11-identity-problems-fan-principle : posted 26 August 2012).

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What Is Sociological Imagination: Definition & Examples

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

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Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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• The term sociological imagination describes the type of insight offered by sociology; connecting the problems of individuals to that of broader society.
• C. Wright Mills, the originator of the term, contended that both sociologists and non-academics can develop a deep understanding of how the events of their own lives (their biography) relate to the history of their society. He outlined a list of methods through which both groups could do so.
• Mills believed that American society suffered from the fundamental problems of alienation, moral insensibility, threats to democracy, threats to human freedom, and conflict between bureaucratic rationality and human reason, and that the development of the sociological imagination could counter these.

What is Sociological Imagination?

Sociological imagination, an idea that first emerged in C. Wright Mills’ book of the same name, is the ability to connect one’s personal challenges to larger social issues.

The sociological imagination is the ability to link the experience of individuals to the social processes and structures of the wider world.

It is this ability to examine the ways that individuals construct the social world and how the social world and how the social world impinges on the lives of individuals, which is the heart of the sociological enterprise.

This ability can be thought of as a framework for understanding social reality, and describes how sociology is relevant not just to sociologists, but to those seeking to understand and build empathy for the conditions of daily life.

When the sociological imagination is underdeveloped or absent in large groups of individuals for any number of reasons, Mills believed that fundamental social issues resulted.

Sociological Imagination Theory

C. Wright Mills established the concept of sociological imagination in the 20th century.

Mills believed that: “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” the daily lives of society’s members and the history of a society and its issues.

He referred to the problems that occur in everyday life, or biography, as troubles and the problems that occur in society, or history, as issues.

Mills ultimately created a framework intended to help individuals realize the relationship between personal experiences and greater society (Elwell, 2002).

Before Mill, sociologists tended to focus on understanding how sociological systems worked, rather than exploring individual issues. Mills, however, pointed out that these sociologists, functionalists chief among them, ignored the role of the individual within these systems.

In essence, Mills claimed in his book, The Sociological Imagination , that research had come to be guided more by the requirements of administrative concerns than by intellectual ones.

He critiqued sociology for focusing on accumulating facts that only served to facilitate the administrative decisions of, for example, governments.

Mills believed that, to truly fulfill the promise of social science, sociologists and laypeople alike had to focus on substantial, society-wide problems, and relate those problems to the structural and historical features of the society and culture that they navigated (Elwell, 2002).

Mills’ Guidelines for Social Scientists

In the appendix of The Sociological Imagination, Mills set forth several guidelines that would lead to “intellectual craftsmanship.” These are, paraphrased (Mills, 2000; Ellwell, 2002):

Scholars should not split work from life, because both work and life are in unity.

Scholars should keep a file, or a collection, of their own personal, professional, and intellectual experiences.

Scholars should engage in a continual review of their thoughts and experiences.

Scholars may find a truly bad sociological book to be as intellectually stimulating and conducive to thinking as a good one.

Scholars must have an attitude of playfulness toward phrases, words, and ideas, as well as a fierce drive to make sense of the world.

The sociological imagination is stimulated when someone assumes a willingness to view the world from the perspective of others.

Sociological investigators should not be afraid, in the preliminary and speculative stages of their research, to think in terms of imaginative extremes, and,

Scholars should not hesitate to express ideas in language that is as simple and direct as possible. Ideas are affected by how they are expressed. When sociological perspectives are expressed in deadening language, they create a deadened sociological imagination.

Mills’ Original Social Problems

Mills identified five main social problems in American society: alienation , moral insensibility, threats to democracy, threats to human freedom, and the conflict between bureaucratic rationality and human reason (Elwell, 2015).

1. Threats to Democracy and Freedom

The end result of these problems of alienation, political indifference, and the economic and political concentration of power, according to Mills, is a serious threat to democracy and freedom.

He believed that, as bureaucratic organizations became large and more centralized, more and more power would be placed into the hands of a small elite (Elwell, 2006).

2. Alienation

Mills believed that alienation is deeply rooted in how work itself works in society; however, unlike Marx, C. Wright Mills does not attribute alienation solely to the means of production, but to the modern division of labor .

Mills observed that, on the whole, jobs are broken up into simple, functional tasks with strict standards. Machines or unskilled workers take over the most tedious tasks (Elwell, 2002).

As the office was automated, Mills argued, authority and job autonomy became the attributes of only those highest in the work hierarchy. Most workers are discouraged from using their own judgment, and their decision-making forces them to comply with the strict rules handed down by others.

In this loss of autonomy, the average worker becomes alienated from their intellectual capacities and work becomes an enforced chore (Elwell, 2015).

3. Moral Insensibility

The second major problem that C. Wright Mills identified in modern American society was that of moral insensibility. He pointed out that, as people had lost faith in their leaders in government, religion, and the workplace, they became apathetic.

He considered this apathy a “spiritual condition” that underlined many problems — namely, moral insensibility. As a result of moral insensibility, people within society accept atrocities, such as genocide, committed by their leaders.

Mills considered the source of cruelty to be moral insensibility and, ultimately, the underdevelopment of the sociological imagination (Elwell, 2002).

4. Personal Troubles

Personal troubles are the issues that people experience within their own character, and in their immediate relationships with others. Mills believed that people function in their personal lives as actors and actresses who make choices about friends, family, groups, work, school, and other issues within their control.

As a result, people have some issue on the outcomes of events on a personal level. For example, an individual employee who spends most of his work time browsing social media or online shopping may lose their job. This is a personal problem.

However, hundreds of thousands of employees being laid-off en masse constitutes a larger social issue (Mills, 2000).

5. Social and Public Issues

Social and public issues, meanwhile, are beyond one”s personal control. These issues pertain to the organization and processes of society, rather than individuals. For example, universities may, as a whole, overcharge students for their education.

This may be the result of decades of competition and investment into each school”s administration and facilities, as well as the narrowing opportunities for those without a college degree.

In this situation, it becomes impossible for large segments of the population to get a tertiary education without accruing large and often debilitating amounts of debt (Mills, 2000).

The sociological imagination allows sociologists to distinguish between the personal and sociological aspects of problems in the lives of everyone.

Most personal problems are not exclusively personal issues; instead, they are influenced and affected by a variety of social norms, habits, and expectations. Indeed, there is often confusion as to what differentiates personal problems and social issues (Hironimus-Wendt & Wallace, 2009).

For example, a heroin addiction may be blamed on the reckless and impulsive choices of an addict. However, this approach fails to account for the societal factors and history that led to high rates of heroin addiction, such as the over-prescribing of opiate painkillers by doctors and the dysregulation of pharmaceutical companies in the United States.

Sociological imagination is useful for both sociologists and those encountering problems in their everyday lives. When people lack in sociological imagination, they become vulnerable to apathy: considering the beliefs, actions, and traditions around them to be natural and unavoidable.

This can cause moral insensitivity and ultimately the commitment of cruel and unjust acts by those guided not by their own consciousness, but the commands of an external body (Hironimus-Wendt & Wallace, 2009).

Fast Fashion

Say that someone is buying themselves a new shirt. Usually, the person buying the shirt would be concerned about their need for new clothing and factors such as the price, fabric, color, and cut of the shirt.

At a deeper level, the personal problem of buying a shirt may provoke someone to ask themselves what they are buying the shirt for, where they would wear it, and why they would participate in an activity where they would wear the shirt over instead of some other activity.

People answer these questions on a personal level through considering a number of different factors. For example, someone may think about how much they make, and how much they can budget for clothing, the stores available in the community, and the styles popular in one”s area (Joy et al., 2012).

On a larger level, however, the questions and answers to the question of what shirt to buy — or even if to buy a shirt at all — would differ if someone were provided a different context and circumstances.

For example, if someone had come into a sudden sum of wealth, they may choose to buy an expensive designer shirt or quit the job that required them to buy the shirt altogether. If someone had lived in a community with many consignment shops, they may be less likely to buy a new shirt and more likely to buy one that was pre-owned.

If there were a cultural dictate that required people to, say, cover their shoulders or breasts — or the opposite, someone may buy a more or less revealing shirt.

On an even higher level, buying a shirt also represents an opportunity to connect the consumption habits of individuals and groups to larger issues.

The lack of proximity of communities to used-clothing stores on a massive scale may encourage excessive consumption, leading to environmental waste in pollution. The competition between retailers to provide the cheapest and most fashionable shirts possible results in, as many have explored, the exploitation of garment workers in exporting countries and large amounts of co2 output due to shipping.

Although an individual can be blamed or not blamed for buying a shirt made more or less sustainably or ethically, a discussion of why an individual bought a certain shirt cannot be complete without a consideration of the larger factors that influence their buying patterns (Joy et al., 2012).

The “Global Economic Crisis”

Dinerstein, Schwartz, and Taylor (2014)  used the 2008 economic crisis as a case study of the concept of sociological imagination, and how sociology and other social sciences had failed to adequately understand the crisis.

The 2008 global economic crisis led to millions of people around the world losing their jobs. On the smallest level, individuals were unable to sustain their lifestyles.

Someone who was laid off due to the economic downturn may have become unable to make their mortgage or car payments, leading to a bank foreclosing their house or repossessing their car.

This person may also be unable to afford groceries, need to turn to a food bank, or have credit card debt to feed themselves and their families. As a result, this person may damage their credit score, restricting them from, say, taking out a home ownership loan in the future.

The sociological imagination also examines issues like the great recession at a level beyond these personal problems. For example, a sociologist may look at how the crisis resulted from the accessibility of and increasing pressure to buy large and normally unaffordable homes in the United States.

Some sociologists, Dinerstein, Schwartz, and Taylor among them, even looked at the economic crisis as unveiling the social issue of how academics do sociology. For example, Dinerstein, Schwatz, and Taylor point out that the lived experience of the global economic crisis operated under gendered and racialized dynamics.

Many female immigrant domestic laborers, for example, lost their jobs in Europe and North America as a result of the crisis.

While the things that sociologists had been studying about these populations up until that point — migration and return — are significant, the crisis brought a renewed focus in sociology into investigating how the negative effects of neoliberal globalization and the multiple crises already impacting residents of the global South compound during recessions (Spitzer & Piper, 2014).

Bhambra, G. (2007).  Rethinking modernity: Postcolonialism and the sociological imagination . Springer.

Dinerstein, A. C., Schwartz, G., & Taylor, G. (2014). Sociological imagination as social critique: Interrogating the ‘global economic crisis’. Sociology, 48 (5), 859-868.

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Hironimus-Wendt, R. J., & Wallace, L. E. (2009). The sociological imagination and social responsibility. Teaching Sociology, 37 (1), 76-88.

Joy, A., Sherry Jr, J. F., Venkatesh, A., Wang, J., & Chan, R. (2012). Fast fashion, sustainability, and the ethical appeal of luxury brands. Fashion theory, 16 (3), 273-295.

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Spitzer, D. L., & Piper, N. (2014). Retrenched and returned: Filipino migrant workers during times of crisis. Sociology, 48 (5), 1007-1023.

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