When you pick up a science textbook, you don’t expect it to rhyme, and you also wouldn’t expect it to be done entirely in pictures. That’s because those two things—rhyme structure and pictures instead of text—are not features of typical textbooks. If you wrote a college textbook and included those features, the students using your book would probably hate it because it didn’t match their expectations of what a textbook should be. A textbook is a specific genre of writing, just like a literacy narrative, that has its own characteristics and expectations. If you want to write a successful profile essay, you’ll want to know what your reader expects to see when they pick it up.

Here’s the list of features for a profile essay that you’ll want to make sure you include in your paper:

• An interesting subject
• Any necessary background
• An interesting angle
• A firsthand account
• Engaging details

An interesting subject

I’m going to start by saying that you want to make sure that you choose an interesting person to write about. No one wants to read a profile that paints the subject as someone who is exactly like everyone else. One, that doesn’t make for very exciting reading, and two, it doesn’t give the reader anything they didn’t know before. So, try to find someone that has something more interesting than just the usual, normal, average life.^[1]

Having said that, it may come as a surprise to hear that I truly believe that anyone really can be an interesting subject for a profile essay. Sometimes, you just have to put in the work to find out what it is about them that makes a good story to tell, and the work you do to uncover whatever that is can make the difference between a great profile and a really bland one. There’s a TV show you’ve probably never heard of that’s called The Story Trek. The premise of this show is that the host randomly chooses a location (mostly around Utah, because they don’t have a huge budget, but some in other parts of the country, too) by asking someone to identify a spot on a map. Picture the host asking someone to throw a dart at a map, pin a marker on the map while blindfolded, or do some other crazy thing like that and you’ll have a good sense of how they do it. They then travel to that location, find the nearest neighborhood, and start knocking doors and talking to people. He interviews the first person who agrees to be on TV so he can find out more about them, and weirdly, everyone has an interesting story to tell. You could, of course, check out the show to see a bunch of mini video profiles to start to get a sense of what you’re trying to do (the episodes are free to watch on their website, linked above). However, please keep in mind that you, for safety reasons, should not start randomly knocking on doors and asking to interview people. I mean, he had a whole crew with him to keep him safe, after all.

What it really comes down to is how you portray the person that you’re profiling. If you get engaged with or excited about something in their life, when you write about it, that feeling will translate to the reader, and you’ll have an interesting subject.

Any necessary background

When you write up your profile, you’ll probably focus on just the most interesting parts of your subject’s life. That’s natural. However, that shouldn’t be all that you write about. It’s important to give your readers a good sense of who you’re writing about, and doing a good job of that will require that you include some of the person’s background.

You certainly don’t need to include every detail about the person’s life, but you should figure out what the reader needs in order to have a better idea of who your subject is. What are some of the basic details that help to round out your profile? Sometimes, that means where a person is from, but sometimes, that doesn’t matter. It might mean talking about their family,^[2] but again, for some people, that’s irrelevant. I don’t think that elementary-school grades will be very helpful information to include, but I don’t doubt that there’s at least one person out there whose story would benefit from including that kind of information. Essentially, the specific background information you provide will depend on how you want us to see the person you’re profiling, but you need to give us something.

An interesting angle

When we talk about an angle, we’re talking about the way that you look at your subject and present them to your readers. If you write about your subject in the exact same way that everyone sees them, what are you giving your readers? Nothing that they don’t already know, so reading your paper would be a waste of time.

Instead of portraying your subject in the way that everyone is familiar with, try to find an angle that is different. For some people, this interesting angle will be obvious because they have a fascinating job or a unique hobby. However, if someone had a challenging medical experience that they had to overcome in the past, that may not be obvious to others who look at them in their current situation. With subjects like that, you’ll have to dig a little deeper to discover an interesting angle to present to your readers. You are the one that will have to do that work if your subject doesn’t have an obvious angle to write about.

There really are so many different angles you might choose to explore as you write about someone for this profile assignment, and I’d like to present my wife, Michelle, as an example. If you were to sit down and interview her and get to know her, there are a number of different things you might eventually choose to focus on for a profile about her. First, Michelle is an identical twin, so you could write about how that has affected her identity, her life choices, and her relationship with her parents and sister. She’s the mother to four children, so if that is of interest to you, you might choose to focus on how she relates to and guides each of her children differently. We have had a bunch of pets over the years, so if animals are your thing, you might choose to write about how, exactly, we manage two dogs, four cats, a fish and a chicken.^[3] Michelle works as the assistant business manager and HR director at a local school, so you might choose to focus your profile on her professional work. You might be especially interested in discovering how she eventually decided to return to college to get a second bachelor’s degree—this time in accounting—after a lifelong hatred of math so deep, she had to rely on emotional manipulation and pregnancy to graduate from college the first time.^[4] Michelle also has type-1 diabetes, a chronic disease that there is no cure for or respite from, so you might choose to write about how diabetes has affected her life, choices, and experiences for the last 20-plus years. She’s a huge Disney nerd, and you could write about that obsession: where it came from, what she gets from it, how it fills her life, and so on. Finally, you might even decide to write about how she can stand to be married to a complete weirdo^[5] who thinks this is a perfectly fine picture to take^[6] at the end of a family dinner celebrating her and her sister’s birthday. It is entirely possible that you might discover other things that I don’t even know yet, despite how long we’ve been together, that you might find worth writing about.

The most important thing is that you identify the angle that you want to use in your profile and focus on that throughout the essay.

A firsthand account

This is probably the biggest new element that may be a tricky thing for you to do. Part of writing a really good profile of a person is spending time with them and interviewing them. Notice that those are two different things: time spent observing them, and a sit-down interview with them. Without those two things, how can you convince your readers that you really know who your subject is? That’s a really hard sell. “I know so much about Emma Watson! I’m like her best friend!” “Oh yeah? Have you actually ever spent time with her?” “No. Why? How is that important?” It’s kind of ridiculous to suggest that you know enough about a person to help us get to know them if you’ve never met them.

What this means, in an absolute, please-don’t-even-ask kind of way, is that you can’t profile someone famous. That goes for sports figures, movie stars, musicians, famous-just-for-being-famous people—they’re all off limits. “But Teacher, they’ve done a lot of interviews that I could read to learn about them!” Sure, I bet they have, and none of them were conducted by you. You didn’t come up with the questions or ask follow-up questions or pursue an interesting thing that you heard them say that caught your attention. You didn’t get to be in the room and sense their energy or watch their body language or anything. So, the bottom line is that there is no possible way that you can profile someone that you haven’t met, observed, and interviewed.

That doesn’t mean that you have to know them already, though. There are plenty of great profiles written by students who reached out to someone new and got to know them through the profile-essay process. Do you have one of those roommates that you recognize in the hall or in your living room but only know their name and where they came from? The profile essay would be a great opportunity to break the ice and get to know them better, and you can even blame your teacher for making things awkward and forcing the two of you to talk. Do you have an idea of a career you’d like to have one day or a field of study you’d like to go into? This is an awesome chance to reach out to someone working in it or teaching it and profile them as a way of getting to know the vocation or field better. You’re really only limited by your own social anxiety here.

Of course, you’re welcome to profile someone that you already know pretty well, but that has its own set of potential pitfalls that you’ll need to be careful to avoid. I’ll talk more about them a bit later. The main thing to keep in mind is that, no matter how well you think you know them, you still need to observe and interview your subject specifically for this paper.

The interview is also important enough that it gets its own section below. There’s quite a lot more to discuss.

Engaging details

Because you’re trying to paint a picture for your readers using words, make sure you include interesting words that describe your subject well. You shouldn’t go overboard and map out every freckle on their face—no one needs to know that much about them^[7]—but you should absolutely describe the person you’re writing about. Help us see them physically, yes, but also figuratively. What is it like to spend time with them? How do they make you or others around them feel? What is something you wouldn’t know about them unless you’re in their presence? Those are the sorts of details you’ll want to make sure to include in your profile.