COMM 337: Interview assignment

Final draft due Monday, Sept. 24. Interview a classmate (we'll make time at the end of class today) about a time he or she was really surprised by the way something turned out and learned something important from the surprise. This is not a particularly easy assignment: I want you to recreate the event through quotes and descriptive writing, using details you get from the interview. So you're not only interviewing for who-what-when-and-where, you're also drawing your classmate out and getting them to remember the details. What was the weather? What was the setting? What did it look like? What did it feel like? Who was there? What did they say? The trick to this assignment is to get the person you're interviewing to describe things, to take down what they say and quote it back.

The story: A 750- to 1,000 word narrative focusing on what your classmate learned from the surprise. I'd give it a soft lede, sort of a narrative: (1) a little story for an attention-getter; (2) the lesson learned in the nut graf; (3) the body of the story, which will be mostly narrative and description.

I think you'll do best if you approach this story in stages: (1) Do the initial interviewing today. (2) Write up as much of it as you can before class Friday, and make a list of "holes in the story," questions you didn't think of at first but need to explain things now. (3) Ask any follow-up questions on Friday. (4) Do the final draft over the weekend, and turn it the finished product Monday.

I post examples of news-feature stories that do this to the blog. In the meantime, you will get some ideas by reading the Boston Globe story by Richard Knox, and Don Murray's analysis of it, on pages 140-45 in the textbook.