Posting biographical information on your website is extremely important, establishing as it does your bona fides and answering the question on everyone’s mind: why should I listen to you? If you are found wanting, then your audience will, at best, be skeptical of your products/opinions/services or, at worst, your audience will make like a tree and leave. If you are writing more than one biography, the challenge is multiplied.
One of the many tricky aspects of an effective “About Us” page (or pages) is maintaining editorial continuity. And there are so many mistakes to make! The page is a minefield, and the stakes are high.
One place where people are often confused is the issue of displaying educational information. If you are confused, it’s no wonder: no one really agrees about the proper way to do it. You can go to Yale…different departments use different methods. You can go to Harvard…same thing. I like Princeton’s approach, and so—basically—that’s what I’d follow.
Before I get too far, there’s a huge mistake that lots of people make that I want to identify. This happens with degrees that start with “M.” When you spell out an “M” degree, like Master of Arts or Master of Business, then it’s a Master of Arts or a master’s degree, BUT! when you use an acronym you say an MA or an MBA.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, here goes.
Princeton states that its preferred use is to spell out the degree (e.g., Bachelor of Arts or bachelor’s degree). Be sure to include the apostrophe: it’s master’s, not masters.
If abbreviations are used, the abbreviations should include periods, so Doctor of Philosophy would be abbreviated Ph.D. In addition, according to Princeton, the word “degree” should not accompany a degree abbreviation, so these two sentences would be incorrect:
A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he received his B.B.A. degree in 1976, and was also awarded an Illinois CPA Certificate in 1976. Phil received his M.B.A. degree from Kellogg Graduate School of Management in 1977.
But, this business about PhD versus Ph.D. is what an attorney would call “unsettled” law. A bigger sin, however, than using or not using periods to represent a degree abbreviation, is to be inconsistent, and use periods in one degree and no periods in another, like this:
Henry holds a B.Sc. degree in Business from the University of Utah and a MBA in Telecom Management from Golden Gate University.
(And what’s that other mistake in the “Henry” sentence?)
Another thing that Princeton prefers, which I think is good, is to join the location of a school with a hyphen following the school name, if necessary, like this:
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of California-Los Angeles
Instead of this:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of California, Los Angeles
Or this:
University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill)
University of California (Los Angeles)
This hyphenated location is helpful because lots of times there are lots of commas in a bio, and it can make for some heavy going and potential for confusion.
Let’s talk briefly about what I’d call “surrounding words.”
1) The verbs.
“Holds.” I really don’t care for the phrase he or she “holds” this or that degree. You can hold a pen, you can hold a book, you can hold your spouse, you can hold off, you can hold court…but do you really “hold” a degree? It’s just not a good verb for that use.
I prefer “received”: Liz received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory University.
“Earned” is another appropriate verb. Anything but “holds”!
“Attended” and “studied.” When you say that so-and-so “attended” a school or “studied” a certain subject, the inference is that he or she didn’t graduate. So, if there was a degree conferred, I would not use “attended” or “studied.”
2) The location.
Schools located in major metropolitan areas do not need to be identified by state, unless there are two cities that are “major” enough that you must identify them by state: Miami (Florida) and Miami (Ohio), and Portland (Oregon) and Portland (Maine) come immediately to mind.
This applies to international cities as well. For example, there is no reason to identify the country where Stockholm is located:
He holds an MSc in Chemical Engineering from The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (Sweden).
Or that Paris is in France:
He holds a Master’s in Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (France).
And Stanford University doesn’t need to be located in the United States in this example, but since I wouldn’t exactly call Liege a household name, placing it in Belgium is helpful to dolts like me. More troubling, of course, is the misspelling, which could easily be because English probably isn’t the first language of the person who wrote this (the person who wrote this probably speaks seven languages better than I speak this one!).
I studied Civil Engineering in Liege (Belgium), and complemented this background with a master degree from Stanford University (United States).
However, I will say that I did know that there was an accent in both École and Liége, and, frankly, I think they should be there. [Turn on your Number Lock, hold down ALT, and, to the far right of your keyboard, press 0-2-0-1 (for the É) and 0-2-3-3 (for the é).]
Sorry this is such a long post, but biographical information should be where you do your very best to SHINE. As such, you need to get it right. More soon.
Recent Comments