profile example

“The boys were halfway across a snowfield when the German airplane appeared. Their rifles, clumsily camouflaged, were sticking out of their backpacks.
They stood frozen as the plane buzzed in tighter and tighter circles around them, wondering if they should run for the only possible shelter, a large boulder in the middle of the field.
It might finally have been curtains for the Kavli boys, Fred and Aslak.
"If we'd run, we would have been done for," Fred Kavli, 77, recalled recently, his head thrown back as he communed with memories of an adventurous youth in wartime Norway. "That was very dangerous, yah," he said, recalling expeditions to steal fuel oil from the Germans.
Mr. Kavli survived his boyhood, much to the retroactive relief of scientists worldwide.”

This is a multi-paragraphed lead and a combination of a couple of the categories discussed in class. It combines the “individual in a dramatic moment” from history with a quote and then connects it to the present by saying that Fred Kavli will affect the scientific community.

The main point, even though it’s a fairly long and diverse article, is that Kavli is a retired engineer and businessman who is now a philanthropist and intends on setting up his own version of the Nobel Prize.

There really isn’t one thing that could be called the nut graph, but this comes close I suppose:

“A year ago, Mr. Kavli stood up in front of a group of the nation's scientific elite at a dinner at the Carlyle Hotel in New York and announced that he was in the process of spending $75 million to endow 10 scientific research institutes, all bearing his name, at colleges around the country and the world.”

The article makes good use of scenes and dialogue.

The article talks of photos lining a hallway in the guest wing of his house. It reads:

"Here he is on a motorcycle trip with his brother, lounging with a pair of young women.

Asked about the women, Mr. Kavli smiled shyly, the points of his cheeks flushing red. "Those are some girls," he said." It's a nice use of dialogue that helps you picture what the man is like.

His physical sense is described in words such as "reserved demeanor," and sets a scene where he's silent, sitting in a chair and thinking of the future. Specifically, the article never really describes his physical attributes, but his mannerisms it seems are fairly well represented by the writer.