Assignment 2

I've gotten several questions from students about your next assignment. Let me answer some questions here.

Do you want a transcript of the interviews?
No, I don't. I want an essay about one or more of the topics that we're discussing this semester. The essay should describe the kinds of things your interviewee talked about, with your comments about his or her ideas, and if possible describing some of the ways his or her ideas connect with the readings.

Should the essay say everything that the interviewee said?
No. Be selective. Pick out what the person said that was interesting. Perhaps they said something that contradicted what we've discussed in the audioconference or affirmed something you read in the coursebook. Perhaps they gave a good illustration of something we talked about. I've done hundreds of interviews for my books and I've learned that people ramble all over in interviews, but they usually say a few interesting things. Figure out what you consider to be interesting in what they said.

Should the essay be structured in the same way the interview was?
Again, no. When people get talking about a subject, they tend jump from topic to topic. In your essay, I want you to provide structure that is based on the topics discussed, not based on the order in which the person talked about the topics. For example, perhaps the person talked about post-Christendom issues at the beginning and at the end of the interview. I expect you to talk about what they said about post-Christendom in one section of your essay. And for those of you taking the paper at the 300 level, you have to interview two people. You can structure your essay by writing first about what one person said and then second about what the other person said. That works best if they focused on pretty different topics. If they focused on pretty much the same topics, it might work best to structure your essay around the topics. For example, you might describe some interesting points one person made about postmodernism, then something the other person said about postmodernism, and then move onto another topic.

Does the essay need to cover more than one topic?
No. If the interview(s) covered one topic in depth, then just focus on that one topic. Or if the interviewee talked about a lot of topics but only one topic was interesting, feel free to ignore the other stuff they said.

Please feel free to email me if you have more questions.