A Life in 300 Words: Writing a Short Biography or Opinion Piece about a Leader

A short biography is not a list of dates. It is an argument dressed as a story: out of a whole life, the writer chooses three or four moments that show who this person was and why they matter. An opinion piece is the same skill turned round: it starts from a claim about leadership and uses lives and facts as evidence. In this lesson you study one model of each, then write your own, using the simple past, reported speech and conditionals from this unit.

1Model 1: a short biography

Written by Ganzaa from the sources listed at the end of the lesson.

Wangari Maathai: the Woman Who Planted a Movement

In 1989 a plan was announced to build a 60-storey tower in Uhuru Park, one of the few green spaces in the centre of Nairobi. One woman wrote letter after letter against it. The government replied, through the newspapers, that she was "a crazy woman". In January 1990 the foreign investors cancelled the project. The woman's name was Wangari Maathai.

Maathai was born on 1 April 1940 in the village of Ihithe, in the central highlands of Kenya. She did well at school, and in 1960 she was one of about 300 young Kenyans chosen to study in the United States, where she earned degrees in biology. In 1971 she became the first woman in Eastern Africa to receive a PhD.

Back in Kenya, she listened to rural women. They told her that firewood was becoming so scarce that families could no longer cook their traditional foods. In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement, which paid women a small sum for each tree seedling they raised and planted. The trees stopped soil erosion, restored firewood and gave the women an income. According to the movement, more than 51 million trees have been planted since then.

Planting trees led her into politics. She was arrested several times for defending forests and democracy, and in 1992 police knocked her unconscious during a peaceful protest. Ten years later, in 2002, she was elected to parliament. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded "for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace".

Maathai died on 25 September 2011. Her legacy is a simple idea that still grows: if ordinary people look after the land, the land will look after them.

2Questions on the biography

1. Why does the writer begin in 1989 rather than in 1940?
2. Find three moments the writer chose as turning points.
3. Find one example each of reported speech and a direct quotation. Why does the writer use each?
4. How did the Green Belt Movement solve more than one problem at once?
5. The last sentence is a first conditional. Rewrite the legacy in your own words.

Show answersHide answers

1. To hook the reader with a dramatic conflict that shows her character (courage against power) before the facts of her early life.
2. Any three: studying in the USA (1960); listening to rural women and founding the Green Belt Movement (1977); the Uhuru Park campaign (1989); election to parliament (2002); the Nobel Peace Prize (2004).
3. Reported: "They told her that firewood was becoming so scarce …" (it summarises many conversations). Quotation: "a crazy woman" or "for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace" (the exact words matter: one shows the insult, the other the official honour).
4. The trees stopped soil erosion and restored firewood (the environment), and the women were paid for the seedlings they planted (an income).
5. Model: When people care for their environment, it gives back to them.

3Model 2: an opinion piece

Written by Ganzaa for an imagined school magazine.

Every Student Should Lead Something

In most schools, leadership belongs to a small group: the prefects, the class monitors, the team captains. Everyone else follows. I firmly believe that this is a waste, and that every student should lead something, at least once a year.

First, leadership is learned by doing it. Nobody becomes a good leader by watching one, just as nobody learns to swim from the side of the pool. If a student organises one revision group, one clean-up or one debate, she will learn more about planning and patience than any speech can teach her.

Furthermore, leaders appear in unexpected places. Wangari Maathai was not a minister when she began; she was a lecturer who listened to rural women. Many of the people who change a school are quiet students whom nobody has ever asked.

Some argue that if everyone leads, nobody will follow, and the school will be chaos. However, leading something does not mean leading everything. A rota of small responsibilities, such as running the library corner for a month or chairing one class meeting, gives each student a turn without removing the school's elected leaders.

For these reasons, I urge our student council to draw up a list of thirty small leadership jobs next term. If every student takes one, the school will not have thirty leaders. It will have a thousand.