Installment #1 of "Follow John's highlighter"

I'll be doing this throughout the quarter, noting what I have highlighted as I read some of the assignments for the class. This is not from an assigned reading, but I thought you might like to have what I read to you last night from "The Craft of Interviewing" by John Brady (1976, Vantage Books, New York).

So here goes:

"Interviewing is the modest, immediate science of gaining trust, then gaining information. . .

"Above all: ask. Pursue the blind alleys; voice your human -- as well as professional -- curiosities. Ask intriguing, innumerable questions, with enthusiam and only civil restraint. In the end, interviewing is less a technique than an instinct. An interview is simply a lively and thoughtful conversation. The more life and thought you invest in your questions, the more answers you will get."

". . . a good interview is sensibly structured. It begins with easy, rather mechanical questions; shifts to knottier, more thoughtful questions; moves back out with mechanical questions (favorite writers, future projects) and closes with a query that offers a ring of finality (one effective question: how would you like to be remembered?). If the interview has logical structure -- a sense of beginning, middle and end -- it will have emotional structure as well.

"The interview outline need not be dictatorial, or detailed, or even committed to paper. It can be a single, tacit purpose. In fact, the simpler it is, the better. It is only a device to give the interviewer confidence, and his questions, momentum. It gives the interviewer the reins of the interview."

And I hope I stressed enough that you need to do as much research as possible before the interview on the person you are interviewing. Don't be like this reporter:

". . . When Vivien Leigh arrived in Atlanta for the premiere of the reissue of Gone With the Wind, a reporter asked her what part she had played in the film. Scarlett informed the writer that she did not care to be interviewed by such an ignoramus."