Slippery Rock University Blog

            Our third creative writing graduate was an e-mail interview, given that she now lives at least a day’s drive from Western Pennsylvania.

            The subject lives in a small town in the southeastern section of North Carolina, is not employed, volunteers for the local humane society where she has writing projects, and has also written articles for the local paper on “pet issues.”  No articles or humane society documents were supplied as samples, however; just a pre-election e-mail to “friends and family” concerning candidate Obama’s position on abortion and the first chapter of a mystery novel she has completed and for which she is seeking an agent.  The subject checked “yes” for writing both “public” and “persuasive” writing, and the fiction is meant to be the example of the former, while the e-mail exemplifies the latter.  The greatest stylistic challenge for the e-mail, she says, was to “inform and open doors of information without being too preachy.”  She talks about sensitivity to word choices because of that desire, but does not point to any specific choice in the e-mail for illustration.  This was the difficulty with the few e-mail interviews I did—that I did not have an opportunity to push a subject to elaborate on an initial response to one of the set questions.

            The subject generally writes directly into a computer, using Microsoft Word, although she also mentions taking handwritten notes when interviewing for “an animal/pet article I was writing for my local paper.”  College did teach her to “double check facts and grammar … and to think more clearly and concisely,” but did not help her as much as she would like with sentence structure and the kind of style rules found in Strunk and White.  “I can’t see mistakes I have made at all.  My eyes run right past them.”  For that reason she would have liked an entire course on editing.  (We now try to cover that need in the Introduction to Professional Writing course and the Advanced Research Writing course, both of which our creative writing majors must take.)  The main writing practice she has taken from college is research, especially for her fiction writing.  She relies heavily on the Internet but has learned the value of speaking directly to an individual.  “I have conducted a few phone interviews if I wanted to get something straight from the horse’s mouth.”  Books, particularly police procedurals, are also a source. Like others in our study, she would have appreciated more practice with interviewing as a research technique.