How to give advanced writing students practice at conducting interviews? In my Life Writing class, we've worked on asking good questions and following up to clarify details, and we've spent some time practicing interview skills on each other and then writing up mini-profiles that integrate quotations in interesting ways. But my students know each other too well already--they need to practice interviewing strangers.
So I invited a retired colleague to visit my class. (Let's call her Dr. M.) I told my students very little in advance aside from her name and the fact that she's led an interesting life, and we devoted part of Monday's class to writing questions designed to probe for information that the interview subject might not volunteer all at once.
When Dr. M visited class on Wednesday, each student was required to ask at least two questions; for the first round I drew students' names randomly, and we got started off on the right foot when the first student asked our guest how to spell her name--which she did, slowly and clearly. Dr. M walked around the room engaging students individually and told some great stories about her 42 years as a professor, but she followed my instructions to the letter: if a student asked a vague question, she gave a vague answer. If Dr. M mentioned or even hinted at an interesting story, it was up to the students to follow up and tease out the details. Sometimes they did, but they let some great opportunities slip right by.
And then they had 20 minutes to write a mini-profile, one or two paragraphs based on what they'd learned. Considering the time constraints, some of these profiles were quite good--setting the scene, describing the subject's bright smile and abundant energy, selecting and incorporating quotes that revealed her voice and personality. One student started her mini-profile by stating that Dr. M "may carry the name of her mother and her mother before her, but she has made a legacy of her own." Nice work on such a short deadline!
But about half of my Life Writing students chose to use no quotations at all. Dr. M spoke slowly and clearly (as one would expect from a longtime professor of Communication) and my students were scribbling notes or typing on their keyboards throughout the interview, but somehow many of them had trouble turning their notes into quotes or accurate information. I saw Dr. M's name spelled five different ways and her hometown spelled incorrectly or connected to the wrong state. And then there was the gaffe about her favorite childhood book. I doubt that today's students are at all familiar with The Bobbsey Twins, but how could a student have misinterpreted that as The Bootie Twins?
Today we'll take a look at some of the great examples and I'll try to get some insight on their reluctance to use quotations. I've seen something similar in my American Lit Survey class--in-class essays for which students had full access to their textbooks, but about half of them didn't use any quotations at all. How do you analyze literature without attending to words? And how do you interview a bubbly, dynamic person for thirty minutes without capturing a single phrase worth quoting?
They can learn from this, I'm certain--and so is Dr. M. "You give me hope," she told my students, and those students able to recognize a great quote made certain to write that down.
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