A genre that I feel like I know well is writing autobiographies and biographies. I feel like my expertise as a writer really comes from my ability to recall events accurately, create vivid descriptions, and get an emotional response out of the reader. Usually if I am given a prompt, keywords, or things related to an event in my life, I can recall it with preciseness.

Throughout my entire K-12 schooling, I was required to write a lot of autobiographies and biographies. Whenever I met a new teacher, sometimes we’d be asked as one of our first assignments to write an autobiography about ourselves so that the teacher could get to know us better. Even for this class, we were required to “Introduce” our selves within the first week, which was a form of writing an autobiography. In addition, biographies about famous people were always a requirement in school. I would write about impactful Black figures such as Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, etc. Through reading other peoples writing pieces, I learned many of the conventions that came with both of the genres and I am now able to implement them as if they are second nature.

Autobiographies and Biographies generally have a couple of important concepts.

  • The description of the persons life
  • An event that was impactful in the persons life
  • What life means to that person
  • How their younger self crafted them today
  • Their vision for the future
  • Conclusion

The key with autobiographies is recalling events in your life with precision. If you can imagine and feel the scenario you are in, everything else will come naturally. You can describe the smells, the scenery, how you were feeling, etc. All that’s left is putting your words together so your reader is in your shoes and can relate to your experiences.

For my RAB, I would like to stick with the regular conventions of a research article while speaking from a third person point of view. I feel like research papers, especially scientific, have a specific tone and attitude that must be emphasized throughout the paper. It’s not like a comedy piece where you want to get some type of emotion out of the audience. Your intent with a research paper is to be as informative as possible. People read research papers to be informed, not to laugh or feel happy or sad.