Conducting an Interview

As part of TW5212, earlier this week, I interviewed with a professional working in the Higher Education industry. This process involved me preparing a series of questions on a variety of topics to try and learn about them, their career, their field and future trends. It also required me to learn how to carry out an interview appropriately. In this post, I will discuss what I feel I gained from this experience.

The first step in this project was to choose a person to interview. To do so, the class reflected on their interests to determine which area of the fields of technical communication and E-Learning from which we would try to find an interviewee. For me, E-Learning and teaching was very appealing as a subject. I consulted with our lecturer and, through them, I contacted a Department in the University. They, in turn, put me in touch with a person who was interested in being interviewed.

With the interview arranged, I now needed to formulate questions. Doing so began with background research into the subject of the discussion. I gathered as many details as I could about their career using sources such as their University profile page, LinkedIn and even some past interviews in which they had taken part. I then investigated the Higher Education industry as a whole to learn about what the most relevant topics and trends which are currently affecting it include. Based on this background information, I wrote a series of questions which I felt would generate interesting and informative answers.

Organising the questions was a good learning experience. I needed to group the enquiries into categories and organise those categories in a logical order. With the feedback I received on this portion of the assignment, I learned how important it is for the questions to have a natural flow. A crucial part of interviewing is making the interviewee feel at ease. Having a set of queries that progress naturally rather than jumping back and forth between topics can help this. Further, I discovered that it was vital to have planned follow-up questions to make sure more closed questions like “Where did you attend University?” could be built upon as opposed to resulting in a single word answer.

With background information gathered and questions prepared, it was now time for the interview to take place. I think the most important lesson I learned during the conversation was the technique of prioritising the questions I wanted to ask. We had a stringent time limit on the interview because of the participant’s schedule, so I needed to make sure I got the answers to the most significant questions. In practice, this meant I had to skip topics which I felt were less likely to yield interesting information. For instance, I chose not to ask a sequence of questions on the general software tools my interviewee uses daily, in favour of exploring the trends affecting their industry now and in the future. While it is unfortunate that I was unable to investigate areas I was interested in, I believe that I made the correct decision as the information I did get from the questions I deemed most important was, in my opinion, very illuminating.

In summary, this process was incredibly useful in terms of the development of my interviewing skills. As I wrote about in an earlier post, the ability to conduct an interview is essential for a technical writer or E-Learning developer. One needs to be able to gather information from a subject expert if you do not personally have the required knowledge. This assignment has made me far more confident that, should I need to, I will be able to carry out this task again in the future effectively.

Writing Summaries

In our first semester, one of the initial assignments set for us was a technical writing project centred around summaries. Given a long-form news article by the lecturer, the requirement was to produce a Descriptive Summary and an Informative Summary of the piece. We needed to do this while adhering to a rigorous word count – just 50 for the Descriptive Summary and no more than 200 for the Informative version. Condensing an article of almost 5,000 words down to such an extent, presented a daunting challenge.

A Descriptive Summary intends to give the reader an idea as to what the piece pertains. Written almost like the blurb on a book, it should let the reader know whether the subject is one which will appeal to them or not, so that they can choose whether or not to read it.

An Informative Summary, on the other hand, provides the audience with the essential details of what the original contains. It extracts the key points and should be capable of acting as an article in its’ own right, albeit with nowhere near the level of detail of the source.

After the immediate concerns over the scope of what we needed to do, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying the process of producing these summaries immensely. I began by working on the Informative Summary. I did this because I felt doing so would give me a greater understanding of the article and pay dividends when it was time to write the Descriptive summation. I painstakingly went through the column, breaking it down into bullet points and removing what I considered to be verbose language in favour of more simplistic phrasing. Next, I went through the bulleted list and removed all but the vital facts necessary to create the complete narrative of the story. From there, it was a gradual process of editing and re-editing to reduce the word count to the desired level.

Once the Informative Summary was complete, I found writing the Descriptive style much more manageable than I believe I would have if I’d attempted to do so before reducing the piece to its’ significant themes. Were I to continue producing summaries, this workflow would undoubtedly be one I would follow.

I have always been a person who struggles with conciseness in my writing. One of the reasons I haven’t used Twitter extensively, for example, is because I felt overly restricted by the character limits, believing it impossible to have meaningful conversations in such a manner. However, working on this assignment helped me to hone my writing abilities in this area. I think my skills at focusing on the essential ideas I wish to impart are better because of the work done on these summaries. These techniques are important for all aspects of technical writing and instructional design, so this exercise was invaluable.

Once I have completed the MA, I intend to create more of these summations as portfolio pieces. There is an abundance of long-form journalism sources (such as The Guardian’s long reads) from which to draw material. I hope that continuing to work on these skills will strengthen them greatly.