Written Assignments

Due: Monday, November 17, 2014

Basic Information:

Magazines and newspapers are filled with profiles. Unlike conventional news stories, which report current events, profiles tell about people, places, and activities. Some profiles take us behind the scenes of familiar places, giving us a glimpse of their inner workings. Others introduce us to the exotic—peculiar hobbies, unusual professions, bizarre personalities. Still others probe the social, political, and moral significance of our institutions.

Profiles share many features with autobiography, such as narrative, anecdote, description, and dialogue. Yet profiles differ significantly from autobiography. Whereas an autobiographer reflects on a remembered personal experience, a profile writer synthesizes and presents newly acquired observations. In writing a profile, you practice the field research methods of interviewing and notetaking, commonly used by investigative reporters, social scientists, and naturalists. You also learn to analyze and synthesize the information you have collected.

A profile is a special kind of research project. Profiles always involve visits: meeting with a person or going to a place. Profile writers take notes from observations and interviews.

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Profile Essays:

· Are based on a writer’s newly acquired observations through interviews and notetaking.

· Introduce readers to specific insight to people.

· Provide information while at the same time arousing readers’ curiosity.

· Present scenes and people vividly and concretely through description, action, and dialogue.

· Reveal an attitude toward their subjects and offer—implicitly or explicitly—an interpretation of them.

· Create a dominant impression of the subject.

Purpose and Audience Considerations:

A profile writer’s primary purpose is to inform readers. Readers expect profiles to present information in an engaging way, however. Whether profiling people, places, or activities, the writer must meet these expectations. Although a reader might learn as much about a subject from an encyclopedia entry, reading the profile is sure to be more enjoyable.

Readers of profiles expect to be surprised by unusual subjects. If the subject is familiar, they expect it to be presented from an unusual perspective. When writing a profile, you will have an immediate advantage if your subject is a place, an activity, or a person that is likely to surprise and intrigue your readers. Even if your subject is very familiar, however, you can still engage your readers by presenting it in a way they had never before considered.

A profile writer has one further concern: to be sensitive to readers’ knowledge of a subject. Since readers must imagine the subject profiled and understand the new information offered about it, the writer must carefully assess what readers are likely to have seen and to know.

Summary of Basic Features:

1. An Intriguing, Well-Focused Subject:

The subject of a profile is typically a specific person, place, or activity. And, although profiles focus on a person, a place, or an activity, they usually contain all three elements—certain people performing a certain activity at a particular place.

Skilled profile writers make even the most mundane subjects interesting by presenting them in a new light. They many simply take a close look at a subject usually taken for granted, or they surprise readers with a subject they had never thought of. Whatever they examine, they bring attention to the uniqueness of the subject, showing what is remarkable about it.

2. A Vivid Presentation:

Profiles particularize their subjects rather than generalize about them. Because profile writers are interested more in presenting individual cases than in making generalizations, they present their subjects vividly and in detail.

Successful profile writers master the writing strategies of description, often using sensory imagery and figurative language—the senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing, and figures of speech such as simile and metaphor.

Profile writers often describe people in graphic detail. They reveal personal habits and characteristic poses. They also use dialogue to reveal character.

3. A Dominant Impression:

Readers expect profile writers to convey a particular impression or interpretation of the subject. They want to know the writer’s insights into the subject after having spent time observing the scene and talking to people. Indeed, this interpretation is what separates profiles from mere exercises in description and narration.

To convey a dominant impression, writers carefully select details of scene and people and put these details together in a particular way. They also express an attitude toward the subject, an attitude that can be implied through details or stated explicitly. For example, a writer may express admiration, concern, detachment, fascination, skepticism, amusement—perhaps even two or three different feelings that complement or contradict one another.

Writers also offer interpretations of their subjects. An interpretation may be implied or stated directly. It can be announced at the beginning, woven into the ongoing observations, or presented as a conclusion. In combination with carefully orchestrated details and a clearly expressed attitude, these interpretations give readers a dominant impression of the subject being profiled. The effort to create a dominant impression guides all the writer’s decisions about how to select materials and how to organize and present them.

4. An Engaging and Informative Plan:

Successful profile writers know that if they are to keep their readers’ attention, they must engage as well as inform. For this reason, they tell their stories dramatically and describe people and places vividly. They also control the flow of unfamiliar information carefully. Whether the overall plan is topical or chronological, writers give much thought to where unfamiliar information is introduced and how it is introduced.

Profiles present a great deal of factual detail about their subject. However, the information can be woven into the essay in bits and pieces—conveyed in dialogue, interspersed throughout the narrative, given in description—rather than presented in one large chunk.

Parceling out information in this way makes it easier to comprehend: Readers can master one part of the information before going on to the next. Perhaps even more important, such control injects a degree of surprise and thus makes readers curious to know what will come next. Controlling the information flow may, in fact, help to keep readers reading, especially when the essay is organized around topics or aspects of the information.

Narration may be even more important, for it is used by many profile writers to organize their essays. Some profiles even read like stories, with suspense building to a dramatic climax. Writers can organize their narratives to develop and sustain suspense and drama.