PBDS #691

THE ART OF THE INTERVIEW             

            

NOTE: This is representative of the syllabi for this course. It is not necessarily the syllabus being used in any one semester.

 

A face-to-face interview is the most basic, possibly most meaningful type of research, especially for journalists and writers of books dealing with current affairs. This course will address how to research an interview, what to expect from an interview, how to conduct an interview, the ethics of an interview, and how to distill information from an interview and write it up in a coherent and compelling fashion.

 

READING

 

Required:

½   Creative Interviewing: The Writer's Guide to Gathering Information By Asking Questions by Ken Metzler. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. 1887. Third Edition.

½   Absolutely indispensable handouts will be distributed frequently for inspiration, motivation, exhilaration, cogitation, discussion, reading at home, sharing with your spouse/significant other/best friend/cat/dog/ferret/favorite uncle/wisest aunt/brightest neighbor/nearest sage.

½   Over the course of the semester, try to bring to class at least one magazine or newspaper article for discussion. The article may demonstrate terrific † or atrocious † interviewing techniques. In some way, though, it merits discussion & reflection.

 

Recommended:

½   On Writing Well by William Zinsser. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

½   Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, edited by George Plimpton. New              

      York: Viking Press. A multi-volume series of interviews with such writers as     

      James Thurber, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg,

      John Updike, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut on the "guts" of their writing † how   

      they write, why they write, their daily struggles with writing, etc.

½   The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm. Vintage Books, 1990.

½   Guide to Writing Magazine Nonfiction by Michael J. Bugeja. Boston: Allyn &        

      Bacon.

½   Handbook of Magazine Article Writing, edited by Jean M. Fredette. Cincinnati:        

      Writer's Digest Books.

½   Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000.

 

 

 

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

 

Keep an interviewer's notebook for the first 12 weeks of the course. A three-ring binder may work best for this. The notebook should be devoted to ideas for interviews you'd like to do. Each week, enter 2-3 ideas/subjects. Each entry should consist of:

     -- who you'd like to interview. These people may be as accessible as your next-door neighbor, as "elevated" as the Dalai Lama or the Pope, as much of a celebrity as Julia Roberts or Robert DeNiro.

    -- some questions you'd ask at these interviews; how long you expect the interview to be (15 minutes? an hour? two hours?)

   -- the anticipated length of the article that will result from the interview. (800 words? 1,500 words? 4,000 words?)

 -- the slant you'd take when writing up the interview.

 

Essential: Keep your entries in this notebook brief.  These are notes to yourself about ideas. Do not agonize over producing refined, polished prose even though you will eventually turn your notebook into me † on Nov. 18 † to review. And to grade. You can also give me your notebooks 3-4 weeks into the course so I can let you know if you're on the right track.

 

The notebook is not class notes. It is ideas † your ideas † and primarily for your personal use. Do not be overly concerned with neatness. Your entries can be done in handwriting or on an old typewriter you found in a junkyard. What's important is 1) entries be neat enough so I can read them; 2) you not spend more time addressing legibility than you do addressing creativity.)

 

Other than the notebook, writing assignments will be given in the number of desired words. (This -- not the number of pages -- is how people in newspaper/magazine/book publishing think.) The length of an assignment is not arbitrary, although it is somewhat flexible. For a 1,500-word assignment, for example, you don't have to hit that magic number right on the button. On the other hand, don't skimp and write 1,000 words. And don't write a bloated 2,000 words. A general rule of thumb is that going over or under an assigned length by 100 words or so is dandy. Anything excessively above or below that number would be problematic.

 

Assignments have specific lengths to give you a feel for a specific form of writing, for the discipline involved in it, for your own proclivity for -- and comfort in -- that style. Don't be seduced by the numbers! The compression necessary when writing a 500-word essay may be as difficult as the discipline and/or research and/or thinking demanded when taking a 2,500-word essay to full length. Maybe more difficult.

 

All writing assignments should be double-spaced in 12-point characters. Always use one-inch margins. Always indent paragraphs. Do not have an extra space between paragraphs. Those extra spaces disrupt the reading process, turn each paragraph into an isolated island of its own and interrupt the flow of meaning and effect.

All writing assignments should be stapled. Do not use paper clips.

 

REVISIONS

 

Every writing assignment (except the interviewer's notebook) can be revised up to two  times. The grade for the latest revision will replace any previous grades received for that assignment. No revision will be accepted unless all previous versions of that assignment are stapled to it.

 

As you revise, keep in mind this passage from Philip Gerard's Creative Nonfiction:

Revision is... re-envisioning your work. Stepping back from it in light of what you know now, what you have written, and determining if you have done what you set out to do. Just because the piece occurred to you in a certain way and you wrote it that way doesn't mean that was the only way, or the best way, to do it.

 

CLASS INTERVIEWS

 

Starting around the fourth week of the course, every student will have a chance (if all goes well) to interview another student † and to be the subject of an interview conducted by another student. Each interview will last about 15-20 minutes and will be followed by class discussion/analysis.

 

GRADING

 

Grades will be given on just about everything you do in this course: on every writing assignment (including the interviewer's notebook), on the interview you conduct in class, on class participation and attendance:

F -- for work that does not satisfy in any way the course requirements and/or the   graduate level of this course.

C-, C, C+ -- for work that barely satisfies the course requirements and/or the  graduate level of this course.

B-, B, B+ -- good, solid, commendable work.

A-, A -- work so accomplished, so polished, so skilled that an editor receiving it would immediately shriek "Eureka!" and sprint down the hall to brag to colleagues that another Hemingway, Wolfe, Mailer, Capote, McPhee has just been discovered.

There is no final exam.

 

Grades received for writing assignments will account for 65 percent of your final grade; the in-class interview you conduct will account for 20 percent; class participation and attendance will account for 15 percent. Also influencing the final grade will be your progress and improvement as a writer/interviewer and as a thinker about writing and interviewing during the semester.

 

Class participation is not class attendance. "Attendance" means being bodily and (hopefully) mentally present from the beginning to the end of each class. "Participation" means you are contributing to the class with comments, insights, readings you have discovered on your own, yelps of revelation, groans of dismay, holy/transcendent/beatific visions. (But please: NO speaking in tongues.)

 

Any assignment not turned in during the class when it is due will lose half a letter grade. Assignments more than one week late will lose a full letter grade.

No assignment can be e-mailed to me.

     

      Excessive tardiness will adversely affect your grade, as will more than two absences.

 

PLAGIARISM:

 

It is illegal and unethical to use someone else's work without properly crediting the source. If you are not sure whether to credit a source or to quote or paraphrase or to use original language, please ask me in advance † or err on the side of citing the source you are using. If I discover you've plagiarized material for this course, I will follow the university's policy of academic integrity. (See the UB Student handbook for this policy.) Under that policy, the consequences of plagiarism can include failing the course and being expelled from the university.

 

OFFICE HOURS

 

My office #, phone # and e-mail address are in the top left corner of the first page of this syllabus. This semester, I'll be in my office on Mondays from about 4-5:30 p.m. and on Tuesdays from about 7-8 p.m. I'll accommodate any student who wants to meet with me, but an appointment is necessary.

Please call or e-mail to schedule a meeting.  If a before- or after-class meeting is inconvenient for you, I'll try to adjust my schedule -- within reason -- so we can meet at another time.

 

THE WEEKS AHEAD

 

Note: This is a rough overview of the semester. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions may change as the semester proceeds.

 

Week 1: Sept. 2

Get acquainted; general lay of the land; writing and reading assignments for Week #2.

 

Week 2: Sept. 9

SPECIAL EVENT (sort of): Journalist/PR writer Catherine Leidemer and I will interview each other in-class.

READ: Handout from Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer. Also read Chapter 20 in Creative Interviewing.

DUE: 1) Begin your interviewer's notebook which will be turned in Nov. 18.

           2) 500-word profile of Bob Dylan written in the style of Time magazine and based on the clip from "Don't Look Back" shown last week. Plus 300-word critique/appreciation of the interview itself.

 

 

Week 3: Sept. 16

READ: Handout: "How To Ask Good Questions" from Interviews That Work by Shirley Biagi. Also read Chapter 5 in Creative Interviewing.

DUE: A no-holds barred 500-750 word comparison and critique of the interviews done in the previous class by Catherine Leidemer and me of each other. Address what you learned about interviewing, as well as what went well, what went bad, what you might have done differently, and how you would have done it.

 

Week 4: Sept. 23

READ: Handouts: "Stories and Theories" by Robert Coles and an interview by Studs Terkel.

DUE: 500 words on the interview you did with a fellow student in class. This can take any form you wish: a serious essay, a humorous fling, a profile, an editorial. What's essential is that you start learning how to write up what you learn from an interview, that you be alert to verbal and visual cues from your subject, and that you take risks and gambles and push yourself.

 

Week 5: Sept. 30

READ: Handouts from "Interviewing Checklist" from News Reporting and Writing and from the U.S. Holocaust Museum's Oral History Interview Guidelines.

DUE: 500 words based on an in-class interviewing exercise with a fellow student. Again: write this in almost any form you want: an essay, humor, a profile, an editorial, etc.

 

 

Week 6: Oct. 7

DUE: 750-word "oral history" you've done with someone on the lingering effect for them of the September 11 attacks.

IMPORTANT: Bring 3 copies of your "oral history" -- one for me and one for 2 other students to edit & comment upon & return to you at the next class.

 

Week 7: Oct. 14

READ: Handout on celebrity interviewing.

 

Week 8: Oct. 21

READ: TBA

DUE: 500-word analysis of the two Susan Stamberg interviews I played in class on March 11. Susan was quite pleased with one of them; quite displeased with the other. In one, she felt she had established fine rapport with her subject; in the other, the subject kept his intellectual and psychological distance from her. In which of the interviews do you think rapport was established? Which was the "rapport-less" interview? Can you propose ways that Susan could have established more rapport? How would that have benefited the interview? Was one of these interviews "doomed" from the start? IMPORTANT: This class will run from 5:30 to about 6:45 p.m. After that, I'll meet individually with students for 10-15 minute sessions in my office (Room 504) to review

progress to date, discuss any problems, review proposal for your 1,250-word interview-based profile due Nov. 18

 

Week 9: Oct. 28

READ: Chapter 19, Creative Interviewing.

DUE: TBA

IMPORTANT: This class will run from 5:30-6:45 if I was not able to meet with every student on March 18 individually.

 

 

Week 10: Nov. 4

READ: Chapter 10, Creative Interviewing

DUE: TBA

 

 

Week 11: Nov. 11

READ: TBA

DUE: 1,250-word interview-based profile.

IMPORTANT: Bring 3 copies of the profile you write † one for me and one for 2 other students to edit & comment upon & return to you at the next class.

 

Week 12: Nov. 18

READ: Chapter 14, Creative Interviewing

DUE: Turn in your interviewer's notebook. Bring the 1,250-word profiles to discuss with the students who wrote them.

 

Week 13: Nov. 25

READ: Chapter 21, Creative Interviewing

DUE: Revised 750-word profile of Bob Dylan based on the clip from "Don't Look Back."

 

Week 14: Dec. 9

READING: TBA.

 

Week 15: May 13

There is NO final exam, but you are expected to attend this class for general discussion about the course.

DUE: revised 1,250-word profile.