Free professional bio generator for a stronger first draft.

A structural surveyor runs a two person practice on retrofit work in Victorian terraces and has been invited to speak at a regional conference on damp and insulation. The organiser has asked for 150 words in third person by Friday. The inputs: name and role, the field, the audience for the talk, and the checkable proof, which is a decade in the trade, a professional qualification, a teaching role and a published guidance note. Here is the full length version those inputs should produce.

"Ellen Rowntree is a chartered building surveyor and the founder of Rowntree Surveying, a two person practice in the north of England working almost entirely on retrofit and damp in pre 1919 housing. She has surveyed more than four hundred solid wall properties and now spends much of her time on the failures that follow well intentioned insulation work. She wrote the practice's guidance note on internal wall insulation in older terraces, which three local authorities use in their advice to homeowners, and she teaches the damp diagnosis module on a regional apprenticeship scheme. Before founding the practice she spent six years with a multidisciplinary consultancy on housing stock condition surveys. She lives in Leeds."

And the one line version, which is the one that actually gets used: "Ellen Rowntree is a chartered building surveyor specialising in retrofit and damp in pre 1919 housing."

The long version works because the first sentence would stand alone if a host read nothing else, and because every claim after it is something a sceptical listener could check or ask about. The number of surveys is specific and not promotional. The guidance note and the teaching are institutional facts rather than self assessments. The previous role explains the shape of a career in one clause instead of a paragraph. The closing line is short, human, and easy to read aloud without stumbling.

The weaker draft, and the one that turns up in most programmes, usually looks like this. "Ellen is a highly experienced and passionate surveyor with a wealth of expertise across the built environment. Widely regarded as a leading voice in her field, she is dedicated to delivering excellence and has worked with a broad range of clients on numerous prestigious projects. She is a sought after speaker who brings energy and insight to every audience."

Nothing in it can be verified, which is the central failure. Widely regarded and leading voice are claims about other people's opinions with no source attached. A broad range of clients and numerous projects are quantities pretending to be facts. Sought after speaker is an odd thing to print in the programme of an event you are speaking at, since the programme is the evidence and the sentence adds nothing to it. Most practically, it never says what she works on, so somebody choosing between two talks in the same slot has been given no reason to pick this one.

Do not write one until you know which slot it is for. Bio is a loose word covering several formats with different rules: a conference programme entry, an author footer under a guest article, a panel introduction to be read aloud, a partner directory field with a character limit, an internal team page. A draft written for one of those and pasted into another almost always sits wrong, either too long and cut off mid sentence, or too formal for its surroundings.

Skip it if the credentials it would carry are not yet in place. A bio is a credential document and its whole method is naming things a reader can check. If there is nothing to name yet, no talks, no published work, no qualification, no meaningful body of projects, then a bio written today leans entirely on adjectives, which is the exact failure you were trying to avoid. In that position a first person about me on your own site, focused on the work you do rather than the standing you have, is a more honest format and reads better.

Do not draft one casually where accuracy is legally loaded. Protected titles, chartered status, professional memberships, academic qualifications and regulatory registrations are all things people quietly round up when writing about themselves in third person, because the distance makes it feel less like a claim. Write those clauses cold, in the wording your professional body uses, and check them against the certificate rather than your memory.

One more case. If your employer, publisher or professional body issues bios in a set format, do not write a better one. Institutions with a house style will rewrite whatever you send, and their version is the one people read. Find the template, fill it in properly, and keep your own longer version for the places you control.

A bio is nearly always spoken before it is read. Someone stands up with a printed page and introduces you to a room, sight unseen, and every hard clause is a place they can stumble. Read your draft aloud at speed and listen for the trip hazards: a sentence with three subordinate clauses, an unpronounceable organisation name, a run of initials, a number that has to be parsed rather than heard.

Keep sentences to one idea and under about 25 words. Put the qualification after the role rather than in front of it, so the introduction starts with a person and not a string of letters. If your name is regularly mispronounced, a short guide in the message you send is a kindness to the host and saves an awkward moment. And write in third person without sliding into the register of a memorial notice. The way to avoid that is short declarative sentences about the work, not warmth bolted on at the end. A final line naming where you live, or what you are working on this year, does more for a room than any adjective.

Whatever you write will be cut, and it will be cut from the end. Programme designers work to a fixed column depth, editors work to a word count, and a conference producer with forty speakers is not going to negotiate over your last sentence. That single fact should drive the structure: everything you would grieve losing goes in the first two sentences.

It is also why sending the wrong length is worse than it sounds. Send 300 words when 100 were asked for and somebody else picks your best three facts, usually by taking whatever fits the space. Send exactly the requested length and you keep editorial control. Send it as plain text rather than a formatted document, because it is going into a content management system that will strip your styling anyway and may mangle curly quotes on the way through. Include your preferred name spelling, the role title as you want it printed and any accompanying link in the same message, since the person assembling the programme is doing forty of these and will use whatever is easiest to copy.

These three overlap enough that people keep one and use it for all three, which weakens all three. A bio is written for other people to publish about you, so it is third person, factual, and built from things a stranger could verify. It is not selling anything directly; it establishes why you are worth listening to on one topic.

A LinkedIn summary sits on your own page, so it is first person, longer, and can carry motivation, direction and the odd opinion. It is read by people deciding whether to contact you, which makes an implicit next step appropriate in a way it never is in a conference programme. A CV profile is different again: three or four lines aimed at one specific job, rewritten for each application, weighted towards the requirements in the advert and carrying the terms an applicant tracking system will be scanning for. The underlying facts overlap across all three. The selection, the voice and the reader do not. Working from one master file is fine, provided each version is genuinely rewritten rather than trimmed.

Hold one plain text file with three versions in it: roughly 25 words, 50 to 75, and 150 to 200, in that order, with the date of the last edit at the top. Write the short one first and let the longer versions expand it rather than the reverse, since the sentence that survives a 25 word limit is the strongest thing you own and it should open all three.

Update it when something changes rather than on a schedule you will not keep: a new qualification, a change of role, a piece of work that is now better proof than the one currently listed. When you add something, take something out, because a fixed length is what stops a bio drifting into a career summary. Phrase anything time bound so it ages well, since a decade in the trade needs revisiting and since 2014 does not. And keep a note of where the bio is currently published, because an out of date paragraph on somebody else's site is the version a search will surface long after you have fixed your own.