Autobiography is a text in which the author tells the story of his life, showing the main events in the order in which they occurred.
It is a textual genre, which resorts to the narrative text, because it narrates a sequence of real events. But, it can also be considered a literary genre, if the narration includes facts created from the imagination.
Autobiographies can be long, like a book, or short, like the text presented in a lecture.
To the features of autobiography they are:
- narration of the author's own life story in the sequence of his events
- use of personal pronouns in the first person, for example: I, we, with me
- use of possessive pronouns in the first person too, for example: my, my, our
- use of verbs in the past (past) tense
- use of adverbs of time, for example: formerly, after, before, formerly
- use of adverbial phrases, for example: at that time, from time to time
How to write an autobiography
To begin with, we need to read autobiographies to better understand this textual genre and find out what its characteristics are.
After that, we can write our autobiography following these steps:
First step: make a plan of what we want to tell, putting everything in a draft so as not to forget anything that can be useful in our text. We can ask someone who knows us well to talk about us. Thus, we will realize what that person remembers, what they think is important or striking about our life.
Second step: select the main events of our life. Based on what we ourselves consider important and also consider what someone else we talked to said about us.
Third step: collect the necessary data, such as dates, names of people and places or institutions that were part of our life and we want to mention.
Fourth step: after we have planned what we want to tell, we have selected the events and collected the necessary data, it is time to write our text. We shouldn't worry too much about grammar right at the beginning. First, it's important to let the text flow.
Fifth step: read what we write observing the grammar. It is also important to verify that the text is organized and that it makes sense to those who will read it.
Sixth step: Lastly, we need to reread what we've written and make sure we don't miss any spelling or punctuation errors.
examples of autobiographies
Excerpt from a book (long autobiography):
“It's hard to know what our first memory is. I distinctly remember the day I turned three. I remember how important I felt. We took tea in the garden - a part of the garden where, years later, a hammock would sway between two trees. The table was laden with sweets, the birthday cake was covered in icing and displayed the traditional candles. Three Candles. And an exciting occurrence—a tiny red spider, so small I could barely see it, had scurried across the towel. And my mother had said, "It's a lucky spider, Agatha, a good omen for her birthday..."
Then the memory fades, keeping only the fragmentary reminiscences of an endless discussion held with my brother concerning the number of cream puffs he was licensed to eat.
Enchanting, safe and yet exciting world of childhood! In my world, perhaps the most absorbing thing was the garden. With each passing year, that garden meant more to me. He knew each tree, and each one of them gave a special meaning. From very early on, in my thinking, the garden was divided into three parts.”
(Excerpt from Agatha Christie's Autobiography)
Lecture excerpt (short autobiography):
In our time, it was unusual for a young woman to go to university. It was a struggle to convince my grandmother to accept my desire to study at university. There were only three majors for an excellent student to pursue: Medicine, Law, and Engineering. I first tried to get my grandmother's support to study medicine. For moral reasons, she forbade it. How could a woman see naked bodies next to their male counterparts? So I decided to study Law, but I needed money to pay for my studies. According to my grandmother, I had to work to study, but the only acceptable job for a woman in my social class – the old economically decadent upper class – was teaching. I had a high school diploma (a kind of Normal School diploma), which allowed me to teach in primary school, but all my family knew that I hated the idea of becoming a teacher since they chose this type of high school to me. No one ever imagined that I would accept teaching to pay for the preparation course to enter the Faculty of Law. But I accepted, and that was my great luck in life. In order to get a place to teach in the public schools – which paid very well in those days – it was necessary to pass a difficult exam. I took on a temporary teaching job to pay for the annual exam preparation course, and the course organizers were Paulo Freire and his wife, Elza Freire. On the first day he asked us to write an essay explaining why we wanted to be teachers. I wrote explaining that I was being forced to teach in order to earn money to study at the university. In the next class he commented on all the texts except mine. In the end, I asked about the text and he said:
- With you I want to speak in private.
We set up a meeting and after talking with him for three hours I was convinced that education could be a process of freedom and not what I had lived. Paulo Freire converted me to education. In her course, I discovered Art/Education with a teacher, Noemia Varela, who was the director of the Escolinha de Arte of which Paulo Freire was the president of the Council. He was not yet famous nationally, but he was already very influential locally. He and Eunice Robalinho, the mother of a friend of mine, continued to encourage me to take the exam to enter law school.
(Excerpt from lecture recorded by Brazilian educator Ana Mae Barbosa for the History of Art Teaching Project at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio, USA) in 2002)
Difference between autobiography and biography
What differentiates biography and autobiography is the narrator.
The autobiography is written in the first person, that is, the person writes about his own life.
The biography is written in the third person, that is, by a narrator who does not participate in the facts told.
Read too: Textual genres It is Biography
Bibliographic references
BACCIN, Edena Joselita; COSTA-Hübes, Terezinha da Conceição. Reflections and propositions of grammar teaching: linguistic analysis practices from the textual genre autobiography.
BARBOSA, A. M. T. B. Autobiography. GEARTE Magazine, [S. l.], v. 4, no. 2, 2017. DOI: 10.22456/2357-9854.76149. Available in: https://www.seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/gearte/article/view/76149. Accessed on: 14 Apr. 2023.
CHRISTIE, Agatha. Autobiography. São Paulo: Círculo do Livro, 1985
FERNANDES, Marcia. Autobiography: how to do it and examples.All Matter, [n.d.]. Available in: https://www.todamateria.com.br/autobiografia/. Access at:
See too
- Textual genres
- Biography
- Anecdote Textual Genre
- Daily Text Genre
- Textual Genre News
- Review: what it is and why it is NOT a summary
- Exercises on Text Genres
- How to make a monograph
