Awkwardawkwardawkward

I thought I was getting better at interviews. Blah. Never mind.

It doesn't help that I can't hear out of my left ear at the moment, and you'd be surprised how disorienting that can be. I also think I've accidentally been speaking louder to the people on my left all day.

The conference room wasn't reserved properly, we had to improvise with a classroom. And I was interviewing three people at once! And they didn't really have a lot to say about their project. Their answers were simple and unattached. It was just a project, they said. Not anything out of the ordinary.

How helpful.

So I was trying to coax something profound out of them with some questions, but I don't think I got anything really story-worthy. It won't be a very interesting article, I think, but they did win first place. So that's something. Even when I asked them why they won first place, they didn't seem very proud. "Our organization, I guess," one person said. "We were really organized, got all our reports in on time."

I'll end up spinning something. I guess it wasn't the best subject. It didn't seem to mean much to them. They didn't really care, they were struggling for things to say. It's the interviews where you can get people talking about what they really, really care about. Those are when you get the best quotes, the best conversations. The best articles, really. But if your subject doesn't care, it's hard to imagine how you're going to make your readers care.

Until then, my feature on the prosthetics organization is up. I am happy. :)

"Ands", periods, and commas.

These are the three things I have most commonly added or deleted from the quotes from yesterday. There are too many ands and not enough commas. Very little rephrasing.

I'm so excited about this article. I hope Bill likes it as much as I do. These people are doing such great things, and I really want to make sure everyone knows about them. Everyone should. They went from trying to make prosthetics out of two-liter bottles to a viable marketable prototype of an affordable, durable upper-extremity prosthetic, the only one of its kind, the product of four years of work. It's just beautiful. They're making a difference.

Back to writing.

Carry On and Keep Doing What You're Doing

(a quote from my transcription today)

The one bright spot of doing all these transcriptions is that one interview was held with a professor who had a British accent. That made me just a little bit happier. I can't help it. He's saying his words all funny and rounding his vowels and saying pro-cess instead of prah-cess. He also had the stereotypical British dentistry, I noticed, which amused me at the time, but he was perfectly nice and very well-spoken.

You know how you listen to someone speak an accent, and then you just keep thinking that accent in your head? I'm typing this with a British accent right now.

But it was really very cute. I was interviewing him on the prosthetic non-profit, because he had been with them since the beginning. He described the founder, coming into his office as a young sophomore, as a naive, charming young man who truly looked like he could have been in middle school. But he was honest, enthusiastic. "You couldn't help but want to help," he said.

The other interview was with a very conversational vice president of the prosthetic non-profit. We never really realize how ridiculously long-winded we sound until we have to type every word that comes out of people's mouths. Sentences are run-on to the extreme, and sometimes don't even make grammatical sense. It never occurred to me while I was interviewing him. But while I was typing out his words, long strings of words where the sentence has 7 independent clauses and some fragments and starts of sentences that stop when he changes his mind and flow abruptly into a new sentence, it just suddenly struck me how natural it sounds when you hear it and how awkward it sounds when it's read.

It'd make a very interesting book to have the characters talk like we do in real life.

It also leads to a great amount of paraphrasing in transcription. Whenever you see a quote in an article somewhere, realize that it's an edited version of the exact words they said. But if we all published exact words all the time, we'd end up with a lot of "um's", "ah's", "you know's", "it's kinda like's", and "I mean's".

"And using all of that, all that can come together to bring us from, like I said, the first prototype to the first viable product, and I mean that's pretty much a summary of how, just what we're trying to do."
"But Jon is there to facilitate what this grant is actually about in terms of putting arms on people, and watching them for a period of time, and seeing how their skin behaves, how they behave, what they can use it for, how the device stands up to the wear and tear, is it easy to understand how to use, because that’s a big thing for us too, is the average person needs to be able to figure out how to use the device, because it can’t be something that’s so complicated or unintuitive that they have a hard time using it."

So I add a few periods and subtract a few conversational transit words. It never changes the meaning. But I can see how it might be a slippery slope--that's why we always email our final drafts to the subjects, in case they want to change any of their quotes. A good system, I think, and the subjects have always seemed to appreciate it. They always make similar changes, making it sound smoother and more professional. 

Sounding just as professional in conversation as in writing is much harder than it sounds.

Mondays.

That day when you're supposed to be transcribing interviews, and you leave your headphones at home.

Sigh. Hooray for Mondays.

Oh, well. I've been moderately productive today without them. It means I can't work on my biggest upcoming article, but it's not exactly time-sensitive (and I already have half a draft), so I think I'll be all right. I've edited two of my pieces and sent them for approval, and also sent a finished article to the head of the undergrad department for review. That should be published soon.

I've also got a few interviews up and coming. I'm getting much, much better at interviewing. I had two interviews Friday for my big IPT article: one with the VP of IPT (a very nice student, who had a lot to say), and one of their faculty advisors, who was a charmingly quiet older man with a British accent who had amusing stories and anecdotes about IPT's naive beginnings. I think this article will turn out very well.

Of course, I'm not transcribing the interviews now like I should be. That'll have to wait until tomorrow.

I have an interview with a student, sometime this week or next, who won the Knights of St. Patrick award. (Or....who has become a Knight of St. Patrick? I'll have to be sure to figure that one out...) I already met with him last semester to arrange for his award application for another distinction--which, by the way, he won! Bill emailed me, very excited that a MechSE student had won, and thanked me for my work on that. Most of my work on the award applications was done over my winter break--and while I was on vacation in Maine.

I feel like I could write an amateur's guide to interviews sometime in the near future. When I have the time, I'll put it together. I've learned quite a lot through failure, it seems, judging by how well my present interviews have gone compared to the ones I've held in the past. It's very much an art, and not nearly as simple as one might think. At least, not in the case of interviewing for journalism purposes.

I'm also writing this from a small table in the corner of the office. They hired someone new recently, and she took the front desk while Becky took my cubicle. I'm being told it's temporary. I don't really mind. I don't need much space. The new girl seems a little gloomy, though. Becky always said hi whenever I walked in the door. The new girl at the front desk doesn't even look up for me to say hello.

Becky has apologized to me several times for making me move to a small table. I laugh and tell her it's all right. I almost like it, except for the small lack of privacy.

I'll tell you how the interviews go later this week. And...there might be more complaining about transcriptions. In fact, there probably will be.

"The key to salsa is...passion!"

(the title is a Scrubs quote, for those of you who don't know; I always think of it when I think of either salsa or passion)

I will begin by saying, I've actually been getting interviews right lately. I've had to do a few small interviews with senior students who had worked on senior design projects in the department, and I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of it.

I got them talking about their projects, asked follow-up questions of their explanations, followed the story from beginning to middle to end. And as the final question of every interview, I asked them how taking the class had personally benefited them.

Man, did I get some awesome answers to that one.

And I think that's the trick of interviewing. Find out what the subject wants to say. Don't ask them about their personal responsibilities, ask them about what they're most proud of. Don't ask them what their senior advisor was in charge of, ask them how their senior advisor guided them. And most of all, ask them about what they're really passionate about.

For some of them, that was the projects themselves. I said, "Tell me a little bit about it," and they launched into a long detailed spiel like a torpedo out of a sub. For others, they were careful explaining their project around me, avoiding details and trying to go for the simple big picture. They only really showed passion when I asked them what their favorite part of the project was, or what the most satisfying part was. That got them going.

In my most recent student interview, the subject paused after I asked the last question, and thought about it for a bit. Then he told me that the best part of the senior design project was that it brought together everything he had learned over the past three years and put it right in front of him, right there for him to touch, and that it was the most satisfying feeling in the world. Closure, one might say.

Definitely using that quote.

Nerves of Steel/Steeling the Spotlight (or other lame and cliche steel pun of your choice)

My feature article was published!

I've been working on it since before winter break. We originally did the interview with this particular professor in the beginning of September, and between the transcription of the hour-long interview (which was hired out to someone else, and took several days to get back), the analysis and picking apart of the interview, and all the separate research it took to put into it, the whole thing took about a month when you subtract winter break. It was a very involved article--and I'm so proud.

The most significant help in writing this article was actually my first feature article when I first started working here in October. It was about an alumnus who had decided to bequest money to the university in his will. I looked over the interview, wrote the article, and gave it to my boss to edit. He just finished editing it recently (no rush on this one, apparently), and I was astounded by the edits he had done. He had almost completely rewritten the article. He used the same quotes, but in a different order, and the whole thing was almost utterly unrecognizable.

I tried not to let it get to me. It was one of my first articles on the job, anyway. My personal attachment to it wasn't unbreakable. With it, he had attached a small guide on how to write a good AP-style feature. I cross-referenced the guide and his work--sure enough, I could see the parallels. The story running through the whole thing, the transition from one idea to another until you reach the proper conclusion. It made sense.

Then he handed back my steel feature, and told me to edit it according to the guide. That was the only instruction I got from him.

And I discovered he had been right. I looked at the alumnus article, the guide, the steel article, and saw what I needed to do. Instead of piling on details, I needed to make them flow. One idea led to another until the reader doesn't even know they're being guided. And then at the end, you reach a point: a culmination, so to speak, of why the article is important, and what made it so worthwhile for the reader to take time out of their day to digest.

So I did what he asked. I cut and pasted paragraphs in entirely different orders, sometimes even splitting them or omitting them. I wondered how I hadn't seen this before, why it hadn't occurred to me before that this article had sounded wrong, had read wrong. If you read it from top to bottom, you were saturated with information. If you read my edited draft from top to bottom, you would hear a professor explaining his work, and why it's important. For the next draft that I sent Bill, he had no edits.

That feature article was probably one of my most educational experiences here to date. There's no better way of learning than being forced to work on your own project, separating the pieces and then putting them together the way the reader likes to see them written, even if they couldn't tell you why.

I am getting better.