个人简介是一篇传记性文章，通常通过轶事、采访、事件和描述的结合而形成。

20世纪20年代《纽约客》杂志的工作人员詹姆斯·麦吉尼斯（James McGuiness）向该杂志的编辑哈罗德·罗斯（Harold Ross）建议使用“个人简介”（profile）一词（来自拉丁语，“划一条线”）。大卫·雷姆尼克（David Remnick）说：“当该杂志开始对这个词进行版权保护时，它已经进入了美国新闻业的语言”（生活故事，2000年）。

剖面观测

"A Profile is a short exercise in biography--a tight form in which interview, anecdote, observation, description, and analysis are brought to bear on the public and private self. The literary pedigree of the profile can be traced from Plutarch to Dr. Johnson to Strachey; its popular modern reinvention is owed to The New Yorker, which set up shop in 1925 and which encouraged its reporters to get beyond ballyhoo to something more probing and ironic. Since then, with the wacky proliferation of media, the genre has been debased; even the word itself has been hijacked for all kinds of shallow and intrusive journalistic endeavors." (John Lahr, Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles. University of California Press, 2002) "In 1925, when [Harold] Ross launched the magazine he liked to call his 'comic weekly' [ The New Yorker], he wanted something different--something sidelong and ironical, a form that prized intimacy and wit over biographical completeness or, God forbid, unabashed hero worship. Ross told his writers and editors that, above all, he wanted to get away from what he was reading in other magazines--all the 'Horatio Alger' stuff. . . . "The New Yorker Profile has expanded in many ways since Ross's time. What had been conceived of as a form to describe Manhattan personalities now travels widely in the world and all along the emotional and occupational registers. . . . One quality that runs through nearly all the best Profiles . . . is a sense of obsession. So many of these pieces are about people who reveal an obsession with one corner of human experience or another. Richard Preston's Chudnovsky brothers are obsessed with the number pi and finding the pattern in randomness; Calvin Trillin's Edna Buchanan is an obsessive crime reporter in Miami who visits the scenes of disaster four, five times a day; . . . Mark Singer's Ricky Jay is obsessed with magic and the history of magic. In every great Profile, too, the writer is equally obsessed. It's often the case that a writer will take months, even years, to get to know a subject and bring him or her to life in prose." (David Remnick, Life Stories: Profiles From The New Yorker. Random House, 2000)

轮廓的各个部分

"One major reason writers create profiles is to let others know more about the people who are important to them or who shape the world in which we live. . . . [T]he introduction to a profile needs to show readers that the subject is someone they need to know more about--right now. . . . Writers also use the introduction of a profile to highlight some key feature of the subject's personality, character, or values . . .. "The body of a profile . . . includes descriptive details that help readers visualize the subject's actions and hear the subject's words. . . . "Writers also use the body of a profile to provide logical appeals in the form of numerous examples that show that the subject is indeed making a difference in the community. . . . "Finally, the conclusion of a profile often contains one final quote or anecdote that nicely captures the essence of the individual." (Cheryl Glenn, The Harbrace Guide to Writing, concise 2nd ed. Wadsworth, Cengage, 201)

扩展隐喻

"In the classic Profile under [St. Clair] McKelway, the edges were smoothed out, and all effects--the comic, the startling, the interesting, and occasionally, the poignant--were achieved by the choreography, in characteristically longer and longer (but never rambling) paragraphs filled with declarative sentences, of the extraordinary number of facts the writer had collected. The Profile metaphor, with its implicit acknowledgment of limited perspective, was no longer appropriate. Instead, it was as if the writer were continually circling around the subject, taking snapshots all the way, until finally emerging with a three-dimensional hologram." (Ben Yagoda, The New Yorker and the World It Made. Scribner, 2000)