Hey everyone.
I just completed an email interview with a fairly well-known musician for one of the publications for which I am a main contributor. Usually, I do face-to-face or phone interviews and select the best quotes for the story. In this case, my subject was unusually eloquent and 95% of his responses are “worthy” of being left intact. For the record, it’s a fairly standard Q&A style interview, not a narrative feature or profile.
Generally speaking, how do you prefer to go about editing email interviews? Should I leave all his quotes as is, only making minor syntax changes? I feel I’d be doing him a disservice to edit out his quirks (like, his “hahas” which I could reformulate as [laughs]).
My own editor simply told me to use my own discretion with editing email responses, and that’s what I plan to do.
What is your own guideline for this sort of thing?
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I feel like the Q&A format
I feel like the Q&A format shouldn’t really indicate if the interview was conducted in person, on the phone, or in writing, and leaving in little written tics like “haha” would make it clear that it was an emailed reponse. Plus, when people write “haha,” they’re not always laughing in real life; I feel like it’s more of an acknowledgement that if you were talking in person, they’d be smiling while they said the following words, if that makes sense.
I don’t think you have to edit out his quirks entirely, but make sure they’re relatively infrequent and add something to the story. Staying with the same example, if it seems like he was laughing in response to a question, I would make your change to [laughs] but otherwise I would probably edit it out. You have an obligation to your reader not to change quotes, but I do believe there is a certain amount of obligation to your subject not to make them sound stupid. I recently had an interviewee who, when he was trying to emphasize something, switched to ALL CAPS and on paper he looked like he was off his meds. Changing the sentence by making it lowercase but ending the sentence with an exclamation point got the excitement aspect of his point across more effectively, and I think it was a fair edit.
I wouldn’t change the
I wouldn’t change the quotes too much because it could ruin the spark of your writing piece & might not give your interviewee any personality or hiding his true self. If you are going to edit here & there, make minimal changes. Maybe change mispelled words, unless there is a reason why he spells a word a certain way. But the truth is, not many people speak using a wide vocabulary. By habit, its hard when your writing without wanting to edit b/c you want your piece to sound sophisicated.
I would leave the hahas because its different, yet more identifiable & laughable in a good way. I feel like laugh is boring & its part of script that’s telling he laughed, end of story. With haha,I can hear & picture his laugh, even though I have no idea who he is.
thanks for the feedback,
thanks for the feedback, everyone!
basically, i’ve been thinking along the same lines. if i edit anything, it will be minor. his manner of expression will be preserved.