Feature Writing Advanced: Interviewing skills
Learn how to get the most from people in interviews and the secrets of telling complex stories with clarity
This four-hour advanced feature writing course will elevate your research and interviewing skills, and help you tell complicated stories so your reader remains engaged.
What you’ll learn: Interview skills and writing with clarity
We’ll focus on how to get the most from interviews – whether a 10-minute phone call, or an hour-long sit down. You’ll learn about the fundamentals of interview preparation – from finding interviewees and picking locations, to writing open-ended questions and preparing for tricky topics and questions – and we’ll look at how active listening can transform your conversations. We’ll also consider how to deal with celebrities in an interview environment.
The best journalists make complex topics simple. We’ll look at how to make confusing concepts clear, and transform dense information into engaging copy that is easy-to-read and tailored to your audience. You’ll learn how to make the most of complicated quotes from interviews and we’ll get you thinking and acting like a sub-editor to transform your writing.
How you’ll learn
This two-module course will be led by an experienced editor and trainer who will share their practical expertise through presentations, discussion and practical exercises – ensuring you have opportunity to reinforce your learning and test your understanding. As feature writing can often be a relatively solitary exercise, we lean into the opportunity to bring people together to discuss their experiences.
Who the course is for
This course is for you if you want to build a features toolkit of skills and knowledge that will elevate your ideas and writing. You should have professional writing experience. You may wish to complete Feature Writing Essentials, which focuses on structure and ideas generation, before this course.
We currently offer this course as bespoke training for teams and can deliver it remotely or in your offices. Get in touch using the button below to discuss times and dates, as well as how we can tailor it to your needs.
If you are an individual looking for training, you can find all our scheduled courses here.
Course Modules
Interviewing Skills for Journalists
- Interview preparation
- Approaches / techniques
- Listening as a skill
- Why and how to use case studies
- How to tackle celebrity interviews
Writing with Clarity
- Making complex concepts simple
- Simple sentence structure
- Recognising and avoiding jargon
- Dealing with complicated quotes
- Using case studies
Feature Writing Advanced: Interviewing skills
Learn how to get the most from people in interviews and the secrets of telling complex stories with clarity