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Examples of
Profile Essays These essays were written by my English 1001
students in Fall 2005. Their assignment was
to find an everyday hero to profile.
Profile Essay Example #1--"Musical
Mentor" by Ashley Busada
Profile Essay Example #2--"When
Tragedy Strikes" by Elsie Comeaux
Profile Essay Example #3--"The Vet
Wannabe," by Meghan Pittman Profile Essay
Example #4--"An Everyday Superman," by Christopher Arceneaux
Profile Essay Example #5--"In House, In
Home, In Heart," by Allison Lee Butts
These essays were written by my English 1001 students in Fall 2006. Their
assignment was to profile someone with a job
that most people would consider undesirable.
Profile Essay Example #6--"The Huggable,
Loveable Crawfish Farmer," by Hannah Rockett
Profile Essay Example #7--"Treatment for the
Soul," by Kelly Singleton
Profile Essay Example #9--"Not So
Glamorous," Nancy Lloyd |
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A profile essay highlights an individual in a certain way that is of interest to a
particular audience. For
example, profiles of celebrities in Entertainment Weekly describe people
like Scarlett Johansen and Johnny Depp in the way the famous are usually
described for their readers, as people simultaneously similar to us in that they
care for their families and their pets, yet different, stranger, and more
glamorous too. A profile of Billy Bob Thornton, for instance, might tell
not only about his newest child and the pain of breaking up with Angelina Jolie,
but also that he is afraid of antiques and silverware. Or the local newspaper
might profile residents in its weekly magazine section. The South Baton Rouge
Journal has an issue devoted to the men of Baton Rouge, and contains
profiles of everyone from the mayor to a police officer. The Daily Reveille
might profile a student who survived Hurricane Katrina and transferred to LSU
for a semester as a result. Profiles are written for specific audiences,
groups of people who would want to know about these people in the first
place, or find what they did interesting. A profile of Sylvia Fowles in
The Advocate might focus on her time as a Lady Tiger, whereas a
profile of her in Sports Illustrated might focus on her WNBA career
and recent trip to the Olympics.
A good profile is generally based on an interview with the subject, and might
also include interviews with others who know this person. A reporter writing a
profile of the local cat lady, written for The Advocate's magazine
section, would speak with her directly as well as talk to her family and
neighbors of their feelings about her ever-expanding collection of felines. A
good profile should always give us a vivid word picture of the individual being
highlighted. What does this person look like? How does s/he talk? How does s/he
dress? What does s/he smell like? What motivates him/her? Remember that God is in the details, and that
readers should come away from your profile feeling that they now know this
person, or at least a significant aspect of this person. And while you should
always incorporate information from others about the person you're profiling,
that information should serve to describe your subject rather than take on a
life of its own.
And here are some other things to keep in mind when writing a profile essay:1
- When choosing your subject, don't overlook
the person who may seem ordinary on the surface but who is quietly remarkable
in some ways.
- Use straight description sparingly. You don't want the effect of simply
cataloging the things about the person that meet the eye. What you're after
when you use description is the sense that outward appearance reveals or belie
inward traits. For instance, habitual tossing of a head of long,
luxurious hair or fingernail tapping may be worth mentioning as significant
indicators of character.
- In the descriptions you do use, try to appeal to different senses, if
possible.
- Use narrative liberally. Through narration, the individual may be shown in
action. And as a part of telling the story of some of his or her
experiences, it will be perfectly natural to have him or her speak in his or
her own voice, through dialogue. You'll have "instant concreteness" and the
most lively and convincing form of evidence for the dominant impression you
are trying to create. Dialogue contributes to the narrative illusion of
reality, and matters like a person's vocabulary and his/her grammar can be
revealing.
- Consider using the opinions of others in your
profile. For example, the reaction of a
person's children to his or her homecoming or of employees to his/her
arrival at work can tell us a lot about him/her.
- Control your tone carefully, as it is very important in creating an effective
character sketch. Consider early on in the writing process whether you want
to write from a middle distance to your subject, from "up close," or with
detachment. In the final stages of revision, be alert to the subtleties of
word choice which largely create tone.
- Avoid the temptation to moralize tediously about the character's vices and
virtues and to over-sentimentalize, especially with beloved characters.
This is particularly important when writing about everyday heroes.
Moralizing and over-sentimentalizing your subject will make your essay
difficult to endure, and cause your audience to turn against your subject.
- Don't describe the subject through only one incident, but instead, through
a combination of incidents. If you focus too heavily on one incident, you run
the risk of writing an essay that's a narrative about a particular event
rather than a profile of an individual subject.
- Since your profile is based on at least one interview with the subject,
you'll be tempted to organize your essay in the order you asked the questions.
Resist this temptation as it will make for a very boring essay. Instead,
examine the answers you receive to those questions and see what sort of image
of the subject emerges, then weave those responses into a more complex picture
of this person. Return to your subject and ask follow up questions if you need
to. And certainly never, ever organize your profile essay in question and
answer format. This format is generally very disorganized and difficult for
the reader to navigate.
- Do not be an authorial presence in your profile. Do not frequently visibly
ask your subject questions to which s/he has answers. For example, your essay
shouldn't contain many statements such as "And then I asked Mr. Jones if he
felt self conscious about going through other people's trash in order to find
discarded shoes." Instead, you should make yourself as writer of the essay
disappear. Mr. Jones, for example, should merely state that he never really
feels self conscious when people see him going through the trash extracting
discarded shoes as he disdains the opinions of others. See the difference? A
good way to check and see if your authorial presence is intrusive is to go
through the essay and circle all sentences that begin with the pronoun "I." If
you have more than three, then your presence is becoming intrusive.
A good profile essay leaves the reader with a dominant impression of the
individual being highlighted. Readers should come away from the piece feeling
that they know the person being profiled in a specific, or new, way.
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