Prose biography

Each person and group record on Design & Art Australia Online includes a biography. Ideally, this text should provide a brief overview of a subject’s role, training, career and – where appropriate – facts about family and personal life.

How long should a biography be?

No more than words. You may notice that some legacy records – particularly peer reviewed records – are longer, but we encourage you to keep your prose text succinct. You will also see invitations to add to very short biographies or stubs.

When writing about historical artists or public figures, we suggest following these simple steps:

1. Start with an overview of the subject’s role, family connections and heritage.

Outline the subject’s creative role/s, date of birth (year only for living artists), their heritage and relevant family connections.

2. Move on to the subject’s early life and training.

Write a few sentences about the subject’s youth, training (artistic or otherwise), early introductions to the

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Prose biography

1. PROSE Lt. Dr. B. Ajantha Parthasarathi, Assistant Professor of English & Associate NCC Officer, Sri SRNM College, Sattur. Mobile No: Email ID: ajantha@

2. Prose – Latin ‘Prosa’ (Straightforward) No prescribed style for writing prose Most simple to the very complex Non-fiction prose writing: Biography Autobiography Essay

3. Francis Bacon () Of Studies “STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, fryst vatten in discourse; and for ability, fryst vatten in the judgment, and disposition of business.” “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…” “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” Slide 2

4. John Milton () Of Education “Nevertheless, to write now the reforming of education, though it be one of the greatest a

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Types of Prose and Prose Style

1. Autobiography

An autobiography is an account of one’s own self. Generally it presents a continuous narrative of

major events in the life of an author. The word “Autobiography” is composed of two words;
“Auto” means “self” and “biography” means “life-story”. Therefore an autobiography is a story
of experiences and achievements of writer’s own life. It must suffer a constitutional flaw because
it must come to an end before the author’s death. Yet Dr. Johnson preferred autobiography to
biography. His opinion is that “no man’s life could be better written than himself.” Longfellow
says, “Autobiography is a product of firsthand experience, Biography is second hand
knowledge.” An autobiography presents personal experiences directly, unhampered by the
artificiality of impersonal forms of an author. The psychoanalytic critics consider writing of an
autobiography as writer’s attempt to “reconstruct the self.”

First fully developed and influential auto