How are these Biography Writing Examples useful in class?

How is it possible to distill a person’s life, with all its complexities, into a biography? If students are struggling to wrap their heads around this idea, these handy Biography Writing Examples serve as a practical way to familiarise students with the conventions of the biography, through some practical exemplar texts that can be studied in the classroom.

This Biography Writing Examples set contains resources such as an annotated example text, which explores the decisions the writer has made and why they’re effective, and a useful biography word mat to help students to learn some of the key terms that crop up in this style of writing. This would be a great choice of resource if students are just getting to grips with how to write biographically, or alternately if they haven’t studied this topic in a while and are in need of a refresher. The set of resources here could form the backbone of a lesson, with the word mat potentially acting as a permanent classroom decoration.

Explore other exemplar texts, which work brilliantly as talk for writing texts! You can also check out our full range of non-fiction writing resources.

Is there more like these Biography Writing Examples on offer?

If these Biography Writing Examples have left you hungry for more biographical content, we’ve got you covered. Here are a few resources to help your students sharpen their skills when it comes to biographical writing:

• For a lovely reading comprehension activity that can help to familiarise students with some of the key details of an iconic character’s life, try this handy KS1 Rosa Parks Differentiated Reading Comprehension Activity.
• This Fact File Template can help students to think about famous figures as biographers would, by summarising some of the interesting facts about their subjects’ lives.
• To get a sense of how biographers move through a person’s life and focus on key events, try this Neil Armstrong Time Line Activity. The students can choose for themselves which events they think were the most significant.

What are some simple tips for writing biographically?

• Be concise. Lives are complex, and if biographies covered every detail they’d be thousands of pages long! The role of the biographer is to focus on the important parts of a person’s life, and skim over the less important details.
• Be objective. Most of the time, try to just describe the events of the person’s life rather than saying what you think of them.
• Be accessible. Explain why the person is important to readers who might not know them.