Biography is another kind of writing that relies primarily on exposition and blends together the categories of expository writing. A biography is the account or history of an individual's life as told by another person (the biographer). All biographies contain facts and dates. So that the reader may understand the events of the subject's life, the biographer must include background information of time and place, as well as specific information concerning the individual's life and work. If the person was a famous scientist or composer or was involved in work that the average person would not easily understand, the biographer may need to use the "how-to" method to explain certain processes or experiments.
The biographer's first step is to gather facts. To do so, he may spend months, even years, in research. The biographer's second step is to interpret the facts objectively. In this way, he avoids coloring the facts with imaginative details and subjective judgments. These two steps are not easy ones. In writing The Raven, a biography of Sam Houston (pictured at right), James Marquis spent four years separating the facts about the real Sam Houston from the fiction about the legendary Sam Houston.
Biography is not purely exposition. The biographer is telling a life story and wants to help the reader visualize the people and the scenes. Unlike the author of biographical fiction, however, the biographer will not invent scenes or conversations to illustrate the subject's character. The biographer instead learns to select the important details and facts and to communicate them in a telegraphic style. The biographer must make every word count; otherwise, he may find himself with one page for each day of his subject's life.
