How to Write a Professional Biography

• by Mark Vanderpool

Introduction

• A professional biography is often your first and best introduction to potential employers. This document should be less rigid than a resume and more engaging or conversational. Make sure to write for your intended audience in a natural voice with an appropriate tone of medium formality. In an increasingly networked world, consider a web-published version of your professional biography as a major asset. Follow the steps outlined in this guide carefully in order to present your best professional self-image.

Step 1: Organize

• Before writing your biography, you'll need to collect information on your professional accomplishments so you don't leave anything out. Here's where to start:

1. Start with your most recent resume, but don't stop there.¹
2. Make a list of your most significant professional accomplishments.
3. Make a list of any official awards or recognitions.²
4. Ask three current or former employers, colleagues, advisers or professors to write short testimonials about you or your work. Ask them if they wouldn't mind being quoted.
   • Ask an associate to collect this information for you. This should relieve the burden of social awkwardness in asking for it yourself.
   • Even more importantly, ask that testimonials be addressed to a third-party audience, instead of to you. This will make the endorsement more useful in a biographical format.

Step 2: Analyze

• The next step is to sift through all of the data and determine the significance of each element. Keep an objective eye and a view toward the practical benefits someone will find in working with you.

1. Which elements of your work history are most significant in describing your capacities, accomplishments and professional direction for the immediate future?
2. How would an impartial third party represent you, if tasked with writing about you for the intended audience?
3. How would an experienced marketing consultant sell you as a worthwhile investment for potential employers?
4. If you are a freelance entrepreneur or consultant, what can you mention that best establishes your expertise and problem-solving ability relative to the client's needs?³

Step 3: Brainstorm

• The third step is to test run a few short paragraphs that introduce yourself to potential employers or clients while highlighting essential information. Relax and get creative. Flow comes first and editing after.

1. What if you were compelled both to sell yourself and to summarize your life's work in a single paragraph of no more than five sentences totaling fifty to seventy-five words?
2. Write several paragraphs of this type that could each stand alone to represent your professional life, at first expanding your ideas with each and then winnowing down toward shorter paragraphs that capture only the essential information.
3. Consider putting this work aside when you've exhausted your ideas and taking a fresh run at it after at least one full day has passed.
4. Don't look at your previous day's work before generating a fresh series of test introductory paragraphs.
5. Afterward, compare and pick your favorites from the total of both days.
6. Which single paragraph would represent you the best if it had to stand alone?
7. Which one best conveys essential information in a fluid, engaging and conversational style, while also feeling appropriate relative to your audience?¹

Step 4: Expand

• Now that you've got a running start, pick your best opener and follow it with information that rounds out the picture. Build toward a solid half-page profile.

1. You will want to begin with your best introductory paragraph, and then follow it with one to three additional short paragraphs that contain less essential yet still relevant information.
2. Allow yourself to add some personal color and fill in some gaps.
3. If you were trying to do too much with your single introductory paragraph, consider breaking it down into two or three smaller paragraphs that will be easier to read.
4. Make sure to add professional references and links to relevant resources. These might include such things as your online portfolio; especially if you are an artist, photographer, designer or writer.
5. Other relevant links might include examples of web-based projects you've worked on or links to the official websites of organizations you are affiliated with, whether in business or education and whether you are currently engaged with the organization or merely a loyal alumnus.
6. Keep each paragraph very short for scanability; that is, for ease of reading on a computer screen. Live links and scannable web copy are an automatic assumption here, because in this increasingly networked world, a professional biography deserves to be a highly functional and instantly deliverable electronic document.
7. This may sound obvious, but make sure the potential client or employer will find it easy to contact you, perhaps including a choice of phone or e-mail contact information.³
   • Don't just include this information, gently coax the reader to use it. Your document is mere vanity and window dressing without a prompt to establish contact.

Step 5: Compress & Express

• Once you've got your page written, it's time to edit for length and clarity while listening to the overall tone. Be engaging and achieve exactly the right level of formality without sounding stiff or dull.

1. When you examine your work, it should be at least a half-page and no more than one full page in length. Cut any excess. As Tara Kachaturoff advises, make your bio a "one-page wonder."⁴
2. Your professional biography should be an engaging and pleasurable thing to read.
3. Make sure you maintain a consistent and pleasant tone that is neither stiff nor breezy.
4. The level of formality is important.
   • A tone that is too formal makes the document dull and puts the reader to sleep.
   • A tone that is too informal could damage your credibility.
   • Adjust the voice to match an appropriate style and tone for your profession.¹ A creative professional may incorporate a bit of humor to convey an engaging personality without compromising credibility, while a member of a more conservative profession may do better to keep it dry.

Step 6: Listen

• To know if you've achieved just the right tone, there is no substitute for reading your work out loud.¹ You could also consider having someone else read it for you. How does it sound when you simply listen?

1. It should sound like you.
2. It should sound conversational and natural.
3. It should not sound like you are giving a speech before a filled auditorium of prestigious peers.
4. Neither should it sound like a barstool soliloquy or confession.
5. Do not veer toward self-deprecation, and do not veer toward bragging or attention-grabbing antics.
6. You will want to measure confidence with humility and perhaps even sprinkle in a light mix of humor to deliver a balanced and digestible account of your professional history in a tone of medium formality.
7. Think of the way you would speak across the table to new colleagues at a casual dinner.
8. If it doesn't strike the right tone when you read it aloud, it is best to start over and write it again.

Step 7: Record

• One way to achieve a natural sound is to begin with speech instead of writing. Consider the following approach to generating a powerful second draft.

1. If your first draft doesn't sound natural, try reducing it to a bulleted list of five to seven items captured easily in keywords or short phrases.
2. Put these on an index card in the most logical order for delivering essential information up front.
3. Next, turn on a voice recorder and using only the index card for reference, speak briefly about each item, expanding each to three or four complete and interconnected sentences.
4. Again, think of your audience and think of delivering the information in a relaxed manner within a semi-formal setting.
5. Transcribe your recording or have it transcribed for you. See what it looks like from voice to print. You will likely need to pare it down. Edit away the redundancies of speech that will inevitably creep in, but keep the natural quality.

Step 8: Detach

• I and mine or thee and thine, that is the question. It is time to compare first and third-person treatments as viable alternatives. Generate drafts of both kinds before you decide.

1. The preceding steps presuppose that the best first draft will be completely conversational in tone and written in the first person voice:
   • I invented the prototype for the transdimensional flux capacitor while working in an underwater laboratory off the coast of Denmark in 1982.
2. Now it is time to re-write your work in a third-person voice, as though you were an objective reporter looking on from the outside:
   • Dr. Strangebird invented the prototype for the transdimensional flux capacitor while working in an underwater laboratory off the coast of Denmark in 1982.
3. Tara Kachaturoff advises one to write a professional biography always and only in a third-person voice, perceiving an air of credibility to be added in this manner.⁴ However, unless you are the CEO of a major corporation or a celebrity actor or athlete—someone with tremendous status, tons of press, and a team of personal assistants—most people will assume that you've written this document yourself. Dispensing with the third-person convention may well strike your reader as refreshing and unpretentious.
   • After a detailed examination of several good samples, my contention is that you should certainly do it both ways, and then judge for yourself which version feels like a better fit for expressing yourself to peers and potential employers within your own profession.
4. From the Resources list at the end of this page, you will find three sample professional biographies to examine. Notice that one of them is written in first-person and the other two in third.
   • Each of the three works perfectly in its own way. If you can't decide by any other means, consider the vote two to one for a third-person treatment. However, this does not mean that you should skip the steps which entail first writing about yourself in the most natural first-person voice that you can achieve.

Step 9: Re-attach

• Should you include a photograph of yourself along with your professional resume? Career advice experts are at odds on the subject.

Don't Include a Photo

• If you've done research on How to Write a Resume, you may have found this article and with it, Heather Mayfield's explicit advice to exclude photography.

1. This prohibition makes sense in the old world of paper and old-fashioned resumes. And it would make sense to exclude photography if you were showing up in person, anyway, to slide your sleep-inducing old-school resume across the personnel desk in a stuffy investment firm.
2. In a conventional 20th century employment situation, including a photograph on your printed resume is like laying an 8" X 10" headshot on the hiring desk. Unless you're a model or an actor, it's irrelevant information and feels just a tad gratuitous, a sorely miscalculated form of self-promotion.

Do Include a Photo

• This is a professional biography, not a resume. It is a warmer and more personal document, and it is composed with the full intention that it shall stand in for you where you are not physically present.

1. Again, the emphasis here is on preparing this as an electronic document, for instant delivery to anywhere on the planet. In the wired world of the 21st century, every professional is a creative professional and every professional must be media-savvy in this new environment.
2. What's more, the wired world can be an awfully cold place without a picture. There is nothing gratuitous in including one.

Step 10: Compare

• Now that you've worked diligently at the preceding steps, you should have a terrific document near completion. It should already demonstrate a powerful and compelling picture of your own professional life. With this much accomplished, take some time to compare your work with the professional biographies of others. Go to a mainstream search engine and do a simple search on the compound term professional biography. This should yield scores of results.

• Take a look at three terrific examples easily found from a Google search:

1. Anthony Citrano⁵
   1. Anthony Citrano's professional biography feels rather austere, with no picture and a white-on-black scheme. Yet it conveys an impressive range of significant information in short, simple and easily digestible paragraphs.
   2. It is a model of good writing for the web. Notice that he begins with his college years and then moves forward chronologically toward the present time. The college experience, although focused in the humanities, is an immediate antecedent to his entry into the world of wired technology and networks, his sustaining professional interest.
   3. The linear chronology works well in this case, but it is not the only way to go.
2. Barry Parr⁶
   1. Barr's first paragraph focuses on the here and now. Each subsequent paragraph traces backward in time, completing with his college background.
   2. Notice the great economy with words, and notice that Barry's reverse chronology isn't the least bit confusing; rather, he does a nice job of putting the focus up front on his present professional activities.
   3. Finally, notice your feelings about his personality, your estimation of the sort of person he would be to work with. Can you get a fix on it? Doesn't the picture help you a great deal in forming an opinion?
3. Dr. Alan Godlas⁷
   1. You will know instantly from this photo the energy Dr. Godlas brings to the classroom. His love for teaching is palpable, immediate and highly relevant to anyone considering his professional capacities.
   2. You will also get a great model here for all aspects of creating the professional biography of an academician, including links to recent publications.

Step 11: Revise

• Writers in all fields, from journalists to novelists, know that writing is rewriting. This truism pertains for your professional biography, as well.

1. If you don't like what you have, don't hesitate to start the process over from scratch.
   • While potentially quite important to your professional life and future, this is a very short document compared with a novel, dissertation or book-length project of any kind. Nothing should inhibit you from generating multiple fresh takes and comparing them, or from selecting the best of several takes and then continuing to put it through six or seven distinct revisions.
2. Check spelling, grammar and syntax, along with more complex or subtle elements.
3. Pass it to a colleague or spouse for the benefit of a second set of eyes.
   • Sometimes one's own mistakes are the hardest to spot. Avail yourself of every possible resource to make sure a document of this importance will not carry the blight of even a single error.¹

Step 12: Publish

• When it is perfect, publish it. Your work is for nothing if no one sees it.

1. Your options are numerous for authoring and distributing an electronic document. This could be as simple as saving your document in PDF format and distributing it via e-mail attachment.
   • PDF will allow you to incorporate both text and images, and the finished document should look good regardless of the browser and operating system your recipient is using.
   • If you lack PDF authoring tools, you have many choices available.
   • Some of them are even free. For example, OpenOffice.org⁸ provides a shareware office suite much like the familiar set from Microsoft. The word processor included is much like Word, with one important difference—you can make your document like making a Word file, and then choose "Export to PDF" for achieving a more nearly universal format for the work.
2. If you would like to go beyond distributing your professional biography as an e-mail attachment, consider actually publishing your document to the web.
   • Publishing your biography to the web could be as simple as making a Word-type document, saving it as a web page (Word gives you this option), and then finding a bit of hosting space where you can upload the document.
   • Your employer may provide hosting space for this purpose. But if you are self-employed, you have several options. For example, many web-based free e-mail providers supply an adequate amount of free hosting space for members; however, it will look more professional if you buy and register your own domain.
3. If you shudder at the thought of buying domain space and then not knowing how to make use of it—perhaps learning HTML code seems as remote as turning yourself into an astrophysicist—then consider the use of a ready-made platform.
   • One of the easiest ways to begin publishing content to the web is by use of a blogging platform like Blogger⁹, WordPress¹⁰ or Movable Type¹¹.
   • The best providers of web-distributed blogging software even allow you the option of free blogging space at their own domain, or using the software as a platform for blogging under your own domain.
   • If you're serious about distinguishing yourself on the web, you'll definitely want to consider blogging under your own domain.
   • One feature of your blog, of course, will be something along the lines of an About Me page, where you will post your now carefully-crafted professional biography.
   • In addition to the bio page, post updates to your blog on a regular basis and build a readership within your professional community. This could generate awareness of who you are and what you offer that may even outstrip and create more long-range benefits than the biography alone ever will.

Conclusion

• Writing and publishing a professional biography may seem like a lot of work, but the basics are very simple. In addition to everything presented in this guide, you have the advantage, hopefully, of being the world's leading authority on the topic: yourself. Best of luck and take no short-cuts in creating a document that presents the best possible representation of your professional history, aspirations, and abilities.

References for How To Write a Professional Biography

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4} eHow.com: How to Write a Professional Bio for a Company Website or Online Social Network
2. ↑ The-Write-Stuff: Writing A Professional Biography
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1} HomeBusinessWiz: How to Write a Professional Bio or "About Me" Page
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1} EzineArticles: Top Ten Tips for Writing a Professional Overview or Biography
5. ↑ Citrano.com: Anthony Citrano Professional Biography
6. ↑ Parr.org: Barry Parr Professional Biography
7. ↑ uga.edu: Dr. Alan Godlas Professional Biography
8. ↑ OpenOffice.org: Free Office Suite
9. ↑ Blogger.com: Content Management System
10. ↑ Wordpress.org: Content Management System
11. ↑ Movabletype.org: Content Managemnet System

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