Writing about yourself seems not that hard, right? Many students think otherwise once they face an assignment like this. But what are the pitfalls that you should be aware of and how to write an autobiography the right way? Let’s find out.
Difficulties that You Might Face
When you start writing any type of essay, you usually begin with searching for the topic and information for your essay. However, in the case of an autobiography you don’t have to do it. Instead, you should find the right information in your own memory.
An autobiography is basically the story of your life and it might seem to be very similar to a memoir. However, there is a difference. For example, a memoir or a personal essay has a more personal tone to it and describes events in a more detailed way. Moreover, some personal essays even have a topic or a question that they should answer. For example, they might be concentrated around one particular event in your life or personal quality.
The main difficulty with an autobiography, in its turn, is to pick out the key events in your life and filter them to make sure they are suitable for the paper. Another challenge is to structure your autobiography in the right way. However, we can help you with that.
Structure and Key Elements
As the purpose of an autobiography is to tell about the past of a person and their life. That’s why autobiographies are mainly written in the past tense. However, the ending part of it might be written in the present tense because it often contains information about a person’s current status, occupation, or projects in work.
The structure of an autobiography is very simple – it starts from the person’s date of birth and can also include some information about the family and the place of birth. As the story goes, autobiography lists and concisely describes other life events in chronological order right up to the current days.
The key elements of an autobiography are the major milestones that should be definitely included in the text, for example:
- A little background information
- Date and place of birth
- Significant events and the most memorable experiences
- Dates of starting your education, changing schools, academic achievements, etc.
You should not try to remember the exact date of each event up to a day, just write down a year when the event took place and it will be enough. You should also remember to write in the first-person voice, as it is your personal story.
Steps of Writing
You probably would want to start writing right away, however, the first that you should do is to plan and outline your paper. Later, it will take much less time for you to structure and polish your autobiography, once you have an outline on hand. Another thing that you should do before you start writing is to think of what is the purpose of your paper and who is your reader. Sometimes, you are required to write an autobiography as a part of your application or as an exercise for your classes. Either way, you need to understand who is going to read your autobiography and why.
So, once you have your outline with all the key events written down, you can start working on your autobiography. Remember, that it’s not a memoir, so you don’t need to focus on each event very much. But also, you should avoid making your autobiography look like just a list of dates – the balance is hard to achieve but not impossible.
Keep writing until you reach the point when you can tell about your current situation and occupation. It might also include information about the projects that you are involved in, the place you are living now, and your occupation.
Once you are done, read your text a few times and make sure to check the grammar and punctuation – you might want to use an app or software to do so. For example, Grammarly is one of the best tools that you can use whenever you are working on your written assignments. Another way to polish your autobiography is to turn to our team as we can help you with that. And if you don’t have time to write an autobiography yourself or face difficulties in the process, we can create one for you from scratch.