Key learning points

1. A biography is a non-fiction text written about someone's life.
2. Linguistic features of a biography include third person, formal fronted adverbials, formal tone and relative clauses.
3. Structural features of a biography include a title, paragraphs and information grouped by theme.
4. A biography is usually written in chronological order and will contain lots of past tense verbs.
5. Additional factual information can be added to a clause as parenthesis.

Keywords

• Biography - a non-fiction text written about someone’s life

• Formal tone - the effect created by choosing serious, factual language

• Third person - the 'he/she/it/they' perspective, where we talk about another person

• Fronted adverbial - a sentence starter followed by a comma

• Relative clause - a type of subordinate clause starting with a relative pronoun (such as who, which or whose)

Common misconception