Often books have one or two paragraphs about the author, which are called blurbs. In fact, there are people who specialize in writing blurbs. It is a tricky job because the blurb writer wants to provide as much interesting information as possible about the author in one or two paragraphs.
For your first writing project, you will be interviewing a classmate and using your interview notes to create a blurb.
Looking at a Model of a Blurb
First we are going to look at two different blurbs for the same author, E. B. White to give us some idea what blurbs are like. Then I will do a model interview of Ms. McQuillan. After that you will get to do your own interview.
Each of you will be assigned a partner (and, in one case, it will be a threesome) to interview. This will be practice for an interview project you will be doing involving interviewing an immigrant. This is a much shorter interview, but you should be sure to listen carefully, take good notes, and allow your partner to say as much as he/she wishes in answer to each question.
Once you have completed the interview you will write a first draft of the blurb. You may or may not want to include everything from the interview — depends on how you want to approach this. You will want to revise (read over and perhaps make some changes), have the author read it and say it is okay), proofread, and then do a final copy. We will also take photos of all the authors and then you will be able to put the blurb and the photo together in a beautiful final presentation!