Interviewing & How to Listen

After reading serveal pages from my textbook, I learned valubable information about how I should conduct an interview. The first section discusses how to ask questions when conducting an interview. There are two tyes of interview questions: closed questions and open questions.

The book describes closed questions as "like those we answer on application forms or in magazines." These kind of questions do have the setbacks of being easily answered using single phrases and can halt further conversation.

Open questions are questions that are open ended and required more than just single phrased answeres. When asking these kind of questions, an interview should be actively listening and engaged in the informant's answere becasue the answere to these question can spark future questions.

The second sections describe how to be a good listener when interviewing. Good listeners actively pay attention to what their informant is saying. They also do not interrupt their informant and they encourage their informant with verbal acknowledgments to keep the conversation flowing.

The final sections give great examples of how to listen and what a succesful interview looks like usuing helpful techniques like balancing the writer's voice and the informants vioce when documenting and writing about the interview. The examples also show to let the informant remain in the forground telling their story as the main focus.

I founf this reading to be really helpful in guiding me in the right direction in conducting my interview and I will definitely use the techniques stated.

Bowling Interview

This essay was a lot different than the pervious one. In this essay there was not a lot of descriptive details of the surrounding or people. However, this essay was still full of interesting facts. The first paragraph was full of interesting facts about bowling; from fun facts like that bowling is the most widely played sport (I did not even know bowling was considered a sport!) to the history of bowling. I thought it was really sweet that mothers and their children played together. The author obtained good information from the people she was interviewing, like how old they were when they started bowling and how long they have been doing it. even though there was not too much descriptive detail, I still felt like I was there. For example, I got the vibe of how the people were just from how they answered question and talked. The subtitles were helpful becasue I could already have an idea about what was in that section before I read it. It also helped break the paper up. However, the conclusion seemed to be glued onto the last paragraph and did not really fit. I think a longer conclusion in a seperate paragraph would have been a better choice. Other than that, I thought that the essay was pretty good!

Powerpoint Group Progress

Although today was the first day of our powerpoint presentation assignment, my group made a lot of progress. Our topic is about incorporating visuals in documents. So far, we have found useful information and have divided it up into specific topics that we find to be the most important. Instead of working on each topic individually, my group is going to work together. Today we took notes on the information we collected and figured out how to organize it. We also came up with a plan for next class on how we are going to create our powerpoint and what we need to accomplish. My group already knows valuable information about public speaking and presenting so I believe that this project will be a success.

PORTFOLIO

Here is the link to my English 102 Portfolio website:

http://www.j5kelley.weebly.com/