Best Practices for Professional Bios

Purpose

There are no clearcut rules or templates for how to write a captivating professional biography, but the process isn’t completely guesswork either. Many career advisors, companies, and marketing professionals have written extensively about what makes a professional biography stand out from the crowd. That being said, your goal for this assignment is to create a short blog post (400-600 words) that describes what you understand to be the “best practices” of writing a professional biography.

Audience

Considering your audience is a foundational element of writing professionally. While we will won’t be delving into the importance of intended audiences and the “rhetorical situation” until next week, I still want you to write for an audience here. For this assignment, you should write this blog post for your fellow classmates. This group of people will have a similar level of experience as you although they might be coming from different fields or majors. Odds are that many of you have taken similar courses (at least at the beginning of your college career), so you should share a common understanding of basic science concepts.

Content, Organization, and Document Design Requirements

In order to complete the assignment, you must do two tasks:

  1. Read through the resources linked at the bottom of this post. I have organized the list in the order that I want you to read them. There are 10 pieces of content that you need to engage with, but most of them are short and you should be able to skim through them pretty quickly. Pay attention to the advice you see being repeated and be sure to look at some examples that might be linked in the post.
  2. Submit your blog post in the forum and use your name as the topic. I hope to get some good discussion of the advice in these columns, and I hope that you will interact with each other in writing (via replies) just as you might talk if we were meeting in a classroom on campus. Please adhere to the following template, but do not put the bracketed text in the post:
[Paragraph 1] Define what a professional bio is and describe why it would be important for someone in your (desired) field. State that there are X number of elements that you find necessary for a good professional bio.

[Paragraph 2 – X] Write your element in bold followed by a period. Describe what you mean by this element. Go into detail here. For example, (and here’s a freebee) why is your name and position important to state early in the bio? Do this for however many elements you want to discuss. The more elements you have, the fewer words you can dedicate to describing each one.

Use third-person pronouns. When writing for a Meet the Team or About Us page, marketing professionals suggest using third-person pronouns to make the biography appear to be written from the point of view of the company.

[Final Paragraph] Close your post by reiterating (in different words than the intro) why writing a professional bio using the elements that you named is important to your audience’s professional identity and career development.

Style Conventions

Use a concise but formal writing style. Please remember that formal writing does not mean using unnecessarily complicated language or big words. Formal writing is at its best when it’s simple, clear, and respectful.

Proofread carefully to avoid any typos, errors, or unnecessary language. Please do not forget to run spellcheck! As a rule of thumb, make a habit of running spellcheck at least twice for any document.

For this document, everything should be in paragraph form, which means that you focus on using complete sentences and paragraphs. Make sure that all sentences are organized in a logical way, using transition words and phrases as needed.

Resources to Read:

*This reading is a bit different than the rest because it questions whether the methods mentioned in the other readings are actually useful in academia or if they reduce researchers to “brain[s] on a stick.”