So, our company was updating its intranet and wanted all
staff members to post brief bios.
I write for a living…but the idea of writing a bio freaked
me out. Capturing in a few words what I have done for a living all these years,
without sounding vain or frivolous, was clearly a challenge. Resumes are
different – task-oriented and factual, detailed and often exaggerated. The person can almost hide behind their professional
achievements or a fancy template. Moreover,
you have a few pages to make your point. That’s my resume anyway…I don’t speak
for everyone, of course.
Bios, on the other hand, need to bring out the essence of
who you are as a person and as a professional. It’s like writing your
blog profile, except that you can’t quite mention your OCD or your fear of
cats. For a person like me, who’s not done anything that would make anyone
raise their brows and say “Really! You did that?”, it’s even harder. No odd job
as a poker machine technician or a cigarette tester or a window cleaner for a horny
couple or a hairdresser at a correctional facility. Nothing that makes good
stories. Nothing that makes even a bad story, for that matter. I remembered all
the times when we had to write autobiographies of an ant or a shoe, at school. Autobiography
of a technical writer clearly did not make it to the syllabus because it could
scar kids for life (with boredom).
But it had to be done. And I managed to scribble this up, consoling myself that no one ever reads anything on the intranet anyway:
After
completing her post-graduate degree in English Literature, D started her
career in the NGO sector. Writing for
the rights of children, she realised how powerful the pen indeed was. She was then offered a job as an Instructional Designer in the e-learning industry, and she took it up mainly
out of curiosity to know what those words meant (some of her friends’ guesses
were that an Instructional Designer would design charts/aids for teachers who
were graphically challenged or would create fancy covers for text books no one
wanted to read).
Ever
since, she has pursued a career as an instructional designer, technical writer,
content developer and report writer (for companies like Oracle,
PricewaterhouseCoopers and the TATA group in India). No matter what the sector
(finance, L&D, IT etc.) D's focus has been two-fold:
To create quality documentation fit for the
target audience
To improve the way an organisation approaches
and perceives its documentation tasks/processes
Keen
to prove that good documentation ensures good communication, she has often been
caught proof-reading bills, junk mails and post-it notes at home, much to her
family’s annoyance.
What do you think of it?
Must admit that this exercise made me think. Do bios become
epitaphs when people die? Are visiting cards made from putting bios in
compressors? Could a person make a living out of writing other people’s bios? Is
there a Pulitzer equivalent for best-written bios? Was Tolstoy’s bio as long as
his War and Peace? If Homer Simpson had a bio, what would it say? Would Joey
copy Chandler’s bio and forget to change the name on the header? Things like
that, you see. Important things.
If anyone has answers to any of these, let me
know. Until then, here’s hoping that your bios have a story to tell.
