Some Life Hacks for a Brilliant Interview Essay
What does it provide?
To know what you are dealing with is a start point for every student who desires to create a worthy paper. The interview paper is a type of essay that explores various points of view on a particular question using evidence provided by people interviews.
Such paper has a lot in common with a research paper, as both of them have a similar principle of creating. An interview essay is the same as research, but instead of books, you use people’s answers to interview questions.
On the one hand, this fact allows you to broaden the circle of sources and forget about stacks of books and journals. On the other hand, you have direct access to information. It’s an excellent opportunity to communicate face to face with people who are experienced in a specific field and find out their opinion.
Interview papers aren’t something rare. On the contrary, you can see them everywhere, especially if you are reading newspapers and magazines. Journalists always interview famous politicians, actors, musicians, or ask experts to comment on some events. Your task is to do the same but also to format according to academic requirements.
How to write an interview paper in the shortest possible way?
You need to understand and keep in your mind one point – this paper may not be the most difficult to write, but it requires a lot of time for preparation, as you have to ask questions to several people and provide analysis of their answers. So this process would take a particular period. If you don’t want to hurry and do a massive amount of work at the last minute, you should think about everything in advance.
Choose appropriate interview papers format
Interview essay. It is the most common type. You communicate with a person one-on-one so that you can get incredibly detailed answers.
Narrative essay interview. This essay provides that you describe the things you have learned from the interviewee in narrative or question-answer format.
Leadership essay. In this case, you should carefully choose successful interviewees to create a good paper. Be ready that these people are extremely busy, so you should be short.
Career interview. Experience in some sphere is significant for this paper. To produce exciting content, you should work on nontrivial questions considering hiring, personal goals and motivation, achievements, and other things.
Conduct the interview
For many people, it is the most responsible stage of the whole process. And they are right. The harder you work at the beginning, the better results you get in the finale. Now you are working based on your paper.
Determine a general topic. If you are not offered a question, you should pick up an arguable one. In this case, you will receive varying thoughts with unexpected arguments.
Develop a questionnaire. You must prepare several critical questions in advance. Outstanding questions make an interviewee interested in discussion and encourage him or her to share the experience. You may also consider cases when you ask different questions to various people.
Ask your questions and listen to them. You don’t deal with a survey. It means that you give a person a chance to explain the answer and share some background on the topic. While interviewing, you work with two-way communication. You ask the question and then listen to the solution. At this time, you are attentive to what the interviewee says and react according to the situation. Don’t forget about follow-up questions. They confirm that you are also interested in the discussion. Besides, they let you guide the conversation. Don’t forget about making notes or audio records.
Analyze the received data. First of all, make a list of people you interviewed, their reasons and opinions. You may also divide all reasons into two groups – positive and negative experience. Another way to categorize the gathered information is to decide how important and exciting it is.
Organize all your notes. At this stage, you need to work with logic. You may order the notes from the least to most important, from positive to negative or on the contrary. You may also highlight some typical and unusual experience as well as the things you agree or disagree with.
How to write an interview essay introduction?
Your introduction must be catchy and always correlate with a conclusion. This statement is relevant for any essay. You may use a method of opposites. It means that if you start talking about some story in the introduction, in the finale, you provide the end of the story. Other possible schemes cover a pretty long list – scenario and reversed scenario, things most people expect and the reality, questions, and your answers, statistics and its relevance to the interview results, your opinion on the topic and reaction after the interview, your expectations before the conversations and what people said.
What about the body?
You need to order the list of reasons according to the notes you prepared previously. You don’t have to be literal; on the contrary, we encourage you to summarize, paraphrase, and quote your sources. Try to show the connections between reasons and explain why people decided so.