Interview essay

CHARACTER FORMATION WITH INTERVIEW ESSAYS

An interview essay is, in a way, a short biography written by the author following the conduct of an interview. The subject of the essay being the interviewee, it is crucial to formulate a questionnaire that reveals specific details of a person during the social encounter. A working knowledge on how to conduct an interview is also an essential quality of the interviewer that will make the task of completing a justified and objective essay effective. The questions used should expose the person’s ideals, preferences, traits, opinions, and outlooks. These should also be properly selected to elicit the response needed in order to create a valid personality sketch.

The writer must first determine the purpose of the interview and the objectives he wishes to achieve then clearly extend this intention it to the reader. Whatever the targets are for the interview will reflect upon the questions selected to extract the desired response from the respondents. Though the writer is permitted to include his own observations of the interviewee, it must be limited in such ways that are relevant to the objectives of the interview and should not redirect the focus from the verbal findings.

Similar to most, the parts of an interview essay are the Introduction, Body and Conclusion. The Introduction lists the general information about the individual: his idiosyncrasies, interests, background, etc. The Body relays the outcome of the interview and is arranged per topic of discussion. Quotations of the interviewee’s actual responses will be helpful in establishing a genuine association with the persona being written about. The Conclusion expresses the overall assessment of the writer pertaining to what transpired during the social encounter.

There are certain guidelines that can determine the success of the interview. Besides the empirical data gathered, the writer must also relate his experience during the progress of the interview. Among all kinds of questions, the open-ended question is the most preferable for purposes of crafting an interview essay. These questions are hypothetical and do not have just one definite answer. This type of questioning is particularly useful when the interviewer wants to gauge the individual’s grasp on certain matters and the expanse of perceptive abilities towards extemporaneous queries.

The contents of the essay should be logically arranged, either following a chronological system or by order of significance. The reader, after going through the paper, must be able to conjure a mental image of the subject by piecing together the details provided in the essay. It is the writer’s responsibility to make the written representation as analogous to the actual being through the demonstration of pertinent and important details that meet the objective of the interview. For whatever purpose it is conducted, the product essay must be able to generate the equivalent of the respondents by way of the effective execution of each’s respective write-up.