Thinking Through Production

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Write the most flattering interview with yourself you can, while adhering to facts of your life. Write questions that only elicit positive information and that will encourage your audience to take the most positive position toward you. When you are done, list the strategies you used to shape the questions you “asked,” and to shape your responses.

Research the life or actions of a person who fascinates you. Based on your research, write an imaginary interview with that person that will bore others to tears. What interviewing strategies seem to you to underlie interviews that put others to sleep?

Rewrite any of the shorter interviews in this chapter as though it were a short news report. Take out all suggestion of voices and conversation, and turn the interview completely into a short descriptive piece of writing. What can you achieve with the news report that you can’t with an interview—and vice versa?

Use your analyses of the interviews in this chapter to develop preliminary guidelines for interviewers. In your guidelines, describe strategies interviewers can use to shape different results in an interview. Also describe what you consider to be the ethical rights and responsibilities of an interviewer.

Based on your readings of the interviews in this chapter, develop preliminary guidelines for interviewees. In your guidelines, describe what you consider to be the ethical rights and responsibilities of someone being interviewed. Do you think interviewees ought to be able to control the questions they are asked, or to have final say over what gets published? Are there circumstances under which interviewees ought to have these rights?

Interview a person on your campus who does advocacy work you admire, focusing on how that person became involved in such work. Ask questions about the person’s definition of advocacy and reasons for doing the particular advocacy she or he does. Follow the suggestions in Chapter 6 to prepare for the interview, researching any organizations to which the person belongs, developing questions, and setting up a convenient time for the interview. Produce the interview for your campus newspaper.

Take an interview from this chapter and redesign its visual presentation, several times, using widely different colors, typefaces, and arrangements: design it for print or for online publication, or both.
Have several different people each read one of the interviews. How do their responses differ? How might their differing responses result from the visual presentation of the interview?
(For ideas for different webpage arrangements, check out the CSS Zen Garden site. Click the options under “Select a design” to see the same words presented very differently, and click the “Next designs” link to see still more designs.)

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