Wu 1

Lingxi Wu

Writing 2

TA Tymoteusz Chajdas

WP 1 portfolio

Due December 6, 2019

Would Like to Understand Celebrities? Read Their Biography!

As college-level students, we must have read a lot kinds of articles or writing materials in

different genres. What is genre? According to Kerry Dirk's article we have learned in class,

genre is what authors use to attain his or her certain goal with specific conventions under a

particular rhetorical situation1, the circumstance of an event that consists of an issue, an

audience, and a set of constraints. Different genre conveys different information to its audience

to make sure the article can fit the rhetorical situation as well as reach its target. If we want to get

know like the co-founder of Apple Inc., Mr. Steve Jobs, we can find three writing genres to get

those information: website articles, eulogy, and biography. Among these three writing genres,

biography would be the best way to get to know a celebrity's story while the left two genres have

flaws in either ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion) or logos (logic).

The first genre is website article, what we read most in our daily life. Website articles are

articles of any length about any topics and appear on any websites. In this era of mobile-reading,

we can access website articles about all different kinds of information we would like to know

through Google to access any websites or all kinds of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

1
Kerry Dirk, “Navigating Genres.” Writing 2 Reader, pg. 1-8.
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In this rhetorical situation, website articles' audience can be anyone who is needs to briefly read

or learn some information about any topic in a relatively short period. And in most situations, the

audience read those articles to kill time as entertainment. When readers click a link of website

articles to get to know a celebrity, they do not need deeper information about the the person

really is and do not care about the accuracy of the article. As a result, the author can write an

website article in a casual way or even make up some stories or jokes that never happened in this

person’s life to make the readers laugh and have fun. In this way, website articles are lack in

credibility for the reader to truly understand the celebrity. Website articles are also lack of

pathos. For example, there is a website article about Mr. Jobs on the website, Biography (which

is not the real biography of Mr. Jobs). On the left-hand side, there is a column with some quick

facts about Mr. Jobs to let the reader get to know him in a short time. Then on the right-hand

side, there is an article that divided Jobs' life into thirteen different sections and describes briefly

about his experience. As an example, in the section "Steve Jobs' Parents and Adoption," the

author writes, "Jobs was born to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John"

Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students. The couple gave up their unnamed son

for adoption."2 The website article generally introduces the identities of Jobs' birth parents in a

short sentence but includes the information the audience needs to know. However, this

information can only convey what events happened in his life That is, website articles cannot

give readers proper emotion to help them know who the celebrity really is.

The next genre is eulogy, the speech given at a funeral or memorial event to praise the

deceased. The audience of a eulogy might be people who are familiar with or caring about their

former old friend or relative. Furthermore, the eulogies for celebrities may also be published on

2
Unattributed, Steve Jobs Biography, 2017.
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newspaper like the New York Times for normal people who admired the deceased to read. In this

rhetorical situation, mourners usually write the eulogy formally to show respect to the deceased.

Moreover, as most of the presenters know the deceased well, the eulogy does not tend to contain

any general information. Instead, eulogy usually includes some details or stories between the

mourner and the deceased that can show the outstanding qualities and characteristics he or she

equipped while alive. For instance, in the eulogy by Mr. Jobs' biological sister, "A Sister's

Eulogy for Steve Jobs," Mona Simpson writes, "Even as a young millionaire, Steve always

picked me up at the airport. He'd be standing there in his jeans…Once, he told me if he'd grown

up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and

loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of

paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn't known about before, thinking of what could inspire

people on the walls of a future Apple campus."3 In those words about Mr. Jobs' personal life, we

can feel that he is a humble, common touch person from the facts that he still acted as usual

although he has become successful. Moreover, we can also find him a person with creativity and

dream to build a better world. Even in his last days, he tried to figure out what kind of art can

inspire people in new Apple headquarter. These previously unknown pieces of details make up

who Steve Jobs was, tell the audience how great he was and why he should be memorized.

Nonetheless, eulogy is still not strong enough to portray who a person is since it is lack of

disadvantages of the celebrity.

The last genre is biography, which is a detailed description of a giant's life written by

someone else after doing specific research or based on the celebrity recalling in verbal form and

recorded by someone else. It is also the best way for regular people to know the big name. It

3
Mona Simpson, A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs, New York Times, 2011.
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involves not only the essential facts like education, work, relationship, and death but also

presents or highlights various aspects of his or her life presents either highlights or troughs in his

or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's

personality. Also, the audience of biography is entirely different from the former two genres. The

audience is majorly interested in the deepest part of the celebrity's experience. They would like

to learn from his or her successful life to inspire or improve themselves. As a result, a biography

writer should follow some conventions. The first thing is authenticity. The author needs to make

sure what he or she writes is the real experience of the subject. The writer cannot make up some

unveracious experience to make the biography more exciting. Secondly, the language should

consider carefully to avoid misunderstanding. Moreover, the authors should use a narrative

structure to convey the story they want to tell. Chronological order might be a choice to describe

the experience and build a biography system. Finally, between each stories, the authors may use

some creative license to fill the gaps. They need to make the transition between each story

smoothly.

Biography is the most through genre to acknowledge a celebrity because it can helps us

know the celebrity with ethos, pathos and logos. For ethos, the convention of authenticity can tell

us that biography author must do a lot of research to make sure what he or she writes have

credibility. By the contrary, the author of website articles may lake of story and does not know

the subject he or she writes enough since they have never met the person in life. So website

articles are lack in ethos. The second point, pathos (or emotion), is also presented well in

biography since the author writes all the events in details with proper word choice. This can give

audiences what the celebrity thought and felt in those situations. However, website articles do

not present pathos well since we cannot get the same emotion by reading website articles lacked
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of details. The third part will be logos or logics. Celebrities are normal human like us so they

must make mistakes in their lives. As the definition of eulogy says, it mainly praises the

deceased by mentioning the shining point in the celebrity’s life. So we cannot know how and

why the celebrity was in trough during certain periods. As a result, eulogy is lacked of logos to

build a full personality with both advantages and disadvantages of the celebrity. In biography, all

of the important events, including trough, are recorded and may be analyzed. For example, in the

chapter nineteen of book Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson describes Mr. Jobs tough time when he was

forced out of Apple.4 We can know why he made mistakes and how he became successful again

with NeXT (a computer system). In this way, biography performs well in logos by building a

whole personality of the celebrity in both positive and negative aspects.

In conclusion, biography is the best genre to get to know a celebrity. It can introduce a

celebrity to its audiences with ethos, pathos and logos whereas website article is lacked in ethos

and pathos and eulogy is lacked in logos. As a result, if we want to know someone we admire,

we had better to find their biographies rather than searching for website articles or their eulogies

to get to know them.

4
Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 2011, Chapter 19.
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Works Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing 2 Reader.

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.

Simpson, Mona. “A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs.” New York Times, October 30, 2011.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-

jobs.html.

Unattributed. “Steve Jobs Biography.” Biography, April 27, 2017.

https://www.biography.com/business-figure/steve-jobs.