Questions fall into two large groups: closed and open-ended. Neither one is worse, just that they are needed in different situations, to achieve different goals.
Open questions are those to which a person can give a detailed answer, they begin with “why”, “how”, “why”, “what”, etc. Closed questions are those to which a person will give a one-word answer: “yes” or “no”.
Open-ended questions
The power of open-ended questions is that the person will give you a lot of information right away. “How did you get to that dark street?” – you ask, and the person is likely to tell you in detail about the purpose of his journey and the obstacles. Although, of course, he may answer, “I just walked and got there.” You have to be prepared for that, too.
Open questions force a person to enter into a dialogue, give him the opportunity to express himself and reflect. The highest caste of open-ended questions are “why” and “why”. They save the journalist in the most difficult situations: when he is ill-prepared or when there is no time for other questions.
Answering a question beginning with “why” or “why” will, in most cases, tell a whole story with colorful details and express one’s feelings about it.
In most cases, but not always. If the character is taciturn or confused, you will still have to polish his answer with other questions, but you will get enough clues to continue the interview.
The disadvantage of open-ended questions is that the respondent sometimes gets carried away. And if the interviewer is inexperienced, this will be a serious problem for him: interrupting the person is scary, ugly even. So he will sit and listen until the interlocutor runs out of time, and risks simply not having enough time to ask the questions he needs. Do not be afraid to interrupt. Only if a teacher is in front of you, interrupt him or her as carefully and politely as possible. They often perceive it very painfully.
Closed questions
The advantage of closed questions is that they save time. This is handy if you meet with the character spontaneously or you need to quickly take a comment. As a result, the interlocutor doesn’t waste energy picking up words and building complex chains of logic. But in other circumstances, a large number of successive closed questions are inappropriate – the interlocutor will only have to confirm or deny your words.
This is the main disadvantage of closed questions – they do not help to develop a dialogue. If you are just starting out in the interview and are unsure of what you can do, there may be silence after a closed question, and you will get nervous and have no idea what to ask next.
If you need some time to figure out how to steer the conversation, ask an open-ended question that you don’t need – that is, a question to which you have no interest at all. You’ll delete this piece of text – you know this already. But while the person will tell you something, you will get together and come up with a good question.
Gaining experience and courage, you will realize that there is nothing wrong with silence. Sometimes journalists artificially achieve this effect: they ask a simple closed-ended question, get a short answer, and then wait. If a person is not ready for that, he will not sustain a pause and fill it with words, developing a thought.
Clarifying questions.
When answering a question, most characters are inconsistent and confused. In addition, in your respondent’s world, some things are absolutely obvious and he or she will not think of explaining them. You, as the interviewer, are on the lookout for your reader, viewer, or listener. The reader, viewer or listener must understand everything: he must follow the logic and get acquainted with the terms as he goes along. If you feel that something is missing, ask. Sometimes this “something” isn’t that meaningful right now, and can be added to the text or video later (a term, the person’s full title, an explanatory comment about the situation).
But sometimes it is necessary to ask the interlocutor to give an example right on the spot: about what specific phenomenon he is now telling, where what happened, to find out his attitude toward what happened. So when you notice a gap in the answer, ask a clarifying question: “were you just talking about an ordinary worm or an unusual worm?”, “remind me, when did it happen?”, “did it hurt you?”, “so Edward Cullen is a vampire?!”
Important: Clarifying questions most often do not need to be inserted in the final version of the text, the editor does not expect a verbatim transcription of your dialogue, but full and coherent answers of the respondent.
More qualifying questions help to steer the conversation unobtrusively in the right direction: the interviewee switches to this bit of the story and slightly forgets what he was talking about before. He will forget altogether if you start to develop the topic.
Silly questions
Quite a few questions can be classified as stupid if there is no strategy behind them. In other words, stupid questions are irrelevant or meaningless questions that end in a dead end.
You can reach a dead end very quickly, for example, by asking which book influenced a person the most, or by making an abstruse question out of a complex word structure in order to demonstrate your level of intelligence, but in the end confuse the interlocutor and get lost in the process.
Another obvious dead end-even a “brick” sign you shouldn’t drive under-is an appeal to everyday morality at the moment the question is uttered. For example: “Professor, a rat is a living creature, after all, how can you experiment on it?” What do you think the professor will say?
You can convince yourself all you want that any question will help you uncover the character, but it won’t. So before the interview, take a critical look at your questions – whether they are obvious and lead nowhere, too general, too provocative for your irritable interlocutor, or ones that he has already answered a thousand times.