How to write about yourself without sounding like a brochure

Open ten personal websites and read only the about section, and a pattern shows up before the third one: nobody in these paragraphs is doing anything. They are passionate about things. They are on journeys. They believe deeply in the power of good design, or clean code, or human connection. By the fourth site you could swap the paragraphs between pages and nothing would break, because none of them said what the person does or who it's for.

This is not a writing-talent problem. Most of these people write clearly in email and in the documents they get paid to produce. Something specific happens when the assignment becomes "describe yourself" — the sentences drift toward the vocabulary of a dust-jacket bio, because that is the only register most people have seen used for this exact task. The fix is not better adjectives. It is a different question. Instead of asking "how do I describe myself," ask "what does someone need to know in the first sentence to decide whether to keep reading," and the vague words mostly disappear, because none of them answer that question.

The first line is an answer, not an introduction

The most useful discipline for an about page is to write the first sentence as if someone had just asked you, out loud, "what do you do?" Not "who are you" — what do you do, and ideally for whom. That framing rules out almost everything that currently opens about pages.

"I'm Maria, a designer with a passion for creating meaningful digital experiences" is an answer to a question nobody asked. It does not say what Maria designs, who hires her, or what a finished piece of her work looks like. Compare it to "I design onboarding flows for fintech apps, mostly for teams past their first round of funding who need the product to stop losing users at signup." The second sentence is longer and more useful, because a reader can act on it immediately: keep reading if this is relevant, leave if it is not. That is the job of a first line, and vague sentences fail it not because they are badly written but because they refuse to commit to a claim a reader could disagree with.

The test is mechanical: read your current first sentence and ask whether it would still be true with a stranger's name in place of yours. If it survives the swap, it isn't describing you, it's describing a category the reader already knew before they clicked.

If you're building this page from nothing rather than rewriting an existing one, the fastest way to get a first draft worth applying that test to is to start from a CV instead of a blank field. For a single-person site, reach is the strongest way to get there: upload a résumé and it generates the whole page — hero, timeline, projects section — in about twenty seconds, and you can have it live at a real address in under two minutes. Working from your actual history rather than a prompt describing a person in the abstract is why the draft tends to open on what you do rather than how you feel about it, which is the same discipline this article is arguing for by hand. The limitation worth knowing before you rely on it: there is no version history, so a save overwrites the page, and a paragraph you decide was better in an earlier version is simply gone. Keep a copy elsewhere before you start editing the draft in place.

The vocabulary that signals nothing

Certain words have been used so often in this exact context that they've stopped carrying information and started functioning as a genre marker — the reader's eye slides past them the way it slides past "terms and conditions." Passionate. Journey. Believe. Craft, used as a verb applied to oneself. Story, when what follows isn't actually a narrative but a list of job titles. None of these are wrong the way a grammar error is wrong. They are wrong the way a form letter is wrong: technically correct, unable to distinguish the writer from the ten thousand other pages using the same words.

The reason this vocabulary is so sticky is that it feels safe. "Passionate about user-centered design" cannot be factually disputed, which is exactly the problem — a claim nobody can disagree with carries no information. "I've shipped four checkout redesigns, two of which cut cart abandonment enough that the client asked me back for a third project" can be disputed or pictured, and that is what makes it land. Specificity isn't a style choice on an about page. It's the mechanism by which the page becomes credible instead of decorative.

How much of yourself actually belongs here

The advice to "be authentic" is not wrong, but it's usually applied at the wrong altitude. Personality shows through word choice and what you decide is worth mentioning, not through disclosure. Personal detail earns its place when it explains a professional decision, and becomes a liability the moment it exists only to seem relatable.

"I got into accessibility work after watching a family member struggle with a banking app that failed every screen reader test" explains something — it tells a reader why this person's accessibility work might be more than a checkbox. "When I'm not coding I love hiking, trying new coffee shops, and spending time with my dog" explains nothing about the work and reads as filler precisely because it could belong to anyone. The test is the same one from the first line: does this sentence rule anything in or out, or could it sit unchanged on a stranger's page. There is no blanket rule that personal detail helps or hurts, only whether the specific detail is doing work.

A narrower failure mode worth naming is oversharing as a substitute for a hook. A page that opens with a life story — where you grew up, the year you changed careers — is asking a stranger for the patient attention usually reserved for someone they already like. Earn that first, with the first line described above, and the biographical material becomes something a reader chooses to read rather than something standing between them and the point.

Three rewrites

The abstract advice matters less than seeing it applied, so here are three paragraphs in roughly the shape most about pages take, each with a version rewritten against the rules above.

The consultant. Before: "I'm a passionate marketing consultant on a journey to help brands tell their story and connect with their audience in meaningful ways." After: "I run paid acquisition for D2C brands doing $1–5M in revenue, mostly on Meta and Google, and I take on three or four clients at a time so I can actually look at the numbers every week." The second version names the channel, the client size, and a constraint that functions as a credibility signal — something "I love helping brands grow" cannot do.

The developer. Before: "Full-stack developer with a love for clean code and elegant solutions to complex problems." After: "I build backend systems for companies migrating off monoliths, usually the unglamorous middle stretch between the old system still running in production and the new one nobody trusts yet." The rewrite trades "clean code" — a claim every developer makes about themselves — for a specific kind of project, more useful to a reader deciding whether to hire this person for this problem.

The designer. Before: "Creative at heart, I believe great design has the power to change how people feel and interact with the world around them." After: "I design interfaces for health apps, which means most of my work is about reducing anxiety rather than creating delight — fewer surprises, calmer colors, copy that doesn't perform urgency it doesn't mean." The rewrite makes an argument the reader can evaluate — a defensible position about what good design means in this domain, rather than a claim broad enough to apply to every design job that exists.

Two lengths, and when each one is right

Two hundred words is the working default: enough for the first-line answer, one paragraph of specifics, and one sentence of personal detail that passes the ruling-in-or-out test. That length suits a page where the about section carries the whole first impression on its own, above the fold.

Fifty words is right when the about text is one section among several rather than the entire pitch — a hero line plus a short paragraph, with a project list or a timeline doing the rest of the explaining below it. There it only needs to do the first-line job and stop. Padding it to two hundred words when the sections below already carry the specifics just repeats information the reader is about to read again.

The mistake in both directions is treating length as the variable to fix. A vague paragraph isn't improved by cutting it to fifty vague words, and a sharp fifty-word paragraph doesn't need padding to look substantial. Get the first line right, at whichever length the page calls for, and the rest mostly follows.

Updating it without starting over

The dread that keeps people from updating an about page — the sense that a new job means rewriting the whole thing — is mostly unearned. If you followed the method above, the first line is the only sentence tightly coupled to your current role. Everything after it — the way of working, the kind of client you take, the origin story if you used one — was written to describe a pattern rather than a single job, and patterns outlast job titles.

So when the job changes, rewrite the first line, reread the paragraph below it, and touch only what's now factually wrong. Most of the time that is one sentence. What breaks this discipline is having written vaguely in the first place — "passionate about creating impactful solutions" doesn't need updating because it was never tied to anything specific, but that is the problem, not a convenience.

The underlying discipline outlasts any single tool. It connects to the larger point about what a personal website is actually for — a page that exists to answer one question well, not to perform a personality. Whether your about text sits alongside a link to LinkedIn or replaces it, that section is where the answer actually gets written down. For the specific case of writing about yourself in a formal or third-person register — a conference bio, a page representing a studio rather than a person — the rules shift again, which is its own piece: writing about yourself in third person.