A reflective article by Ngo Ee Juin

Since the 10th of January, I have been learning how to write my own personal bio. Personal bios are used as a way to introduce yourself in writing form. They are often included at the end of articles and essays. In a personal bio, there are multiple ways that you can do to make your personal bio unique, which I have learned throughout the 2 months of writing. So, I will share what I have learned to you in this article.

I used just a few but important steps to write my personal bio. I started out the personal bio by listing the outline for it. This is to ensure that my personal bio has a clear structure and its ideas listed down. Here is an example of a rough outline for a bio for a student in LAW which includes:

1. Introduction – name, age, gender etc.
2. Progression – history and achievements in LAW
3. Closure – future plans after finishing LAW

Additionally, there are ideas which we can also include into our bios:

• Hobbies
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Your goals

If we do not outline these points, our bios might be unclear, and this will lead to the bios being unimpactful to others. Having a clear structure also helps to make our bios easier to understand to the readers. As a result, they will be able to get to know us with relative ease by using our personal bios.

After we have created the outline, we will next create our personal bio while following the outline. As we are writing the bio, we try to infuse the bio with our own personality. Infusing our personality into our bios is one of the important tips that we use while writing it. This will ensure that the bio that we write feels unique to us. People who read this kind of bios will also find it more engaging compared to a standard essay that you write for school. We should try to present ourselves positively while writing our bios. Painting ourselves in a bad light is a bad idea because we will make a bad impression to the readers, and ultimately push them away. When we need to write about our weaknesses, we need to avoid overly negative descriptions to avoid deprecating ourselves.

Remember:

After we are done with our bio, we made sure to double-check our work again and again. This is to ensure that there are no careless mistakes like spelling and grammatical errors. Otherwise, the bio will look sloppy and careless, which will reflect on us badly.

Here is one of my earlier drafts for my author’s bio:

This contains a lot of the previous mistakes that I mentioned earlier. The facilitators in LAW guided me to work through these mistakes and made my bio better than before. Here is the final draft of my bio for comparison:

The final draft of this bio is much better than before. The spelling and grammatical errors have been fixed. Apart from that, the newer version describes me honestly but not in a deprecating way. Additionally, the new bio that I wrote has a more solid content since I had described myself more thoroughly.

As this is the end of the article, let me remind you of the benefits of writing your bio. When you write your own bio, you can evaluate yourself as you write it. A personal bio can also help other people to get to know you, as well as giving yourself a great impression to others.

I hope you found this article helpful – happy writing!