My Thoughts on William Zinsser's "Writing About People: The Interview"

After reading a certain chapter called “Writing About People: The Interview” from one of William Zinsser’s books, I began to look for some advice on interviewing people throughout the content of this chapter. The first piece of advice would be to “Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives.” That kind of advice can be very helpful for gathering useful information for an interview that would attract the attention of people reading or watching said interview. Then there is the next tip on writing interviews which is that “Often you will be talking to people who have never been interviewed before, and they will warm to the process awkwardly, self-consciously, perhaps not giving you anything you can use.” This quote can be more useful as a tip than as a warning since it is highly likely that if you’re conducting an interview with any person then they would probably have little to no experience with being interviewed. With that said, here is the last bit of advice that I found  which is “Taking notes, however, has one big problem: the person you’re interviewing often starts talking faster than you can write.” My thoughts on this advice is that it’s true, I personally had issues with writing down notes based on what a professor was saying during one of their lectures. Throughout the entirety of this specific William Zinsser chapter, I learned that these three pieces of advice on interviewing hold some good value for conducting a successful interview.