May I Quote You? What’s the difference between a good quote and a quote that says nothing?

ARE GOOD QUOTES IMPORTANT? Good quotes are essential in both Yearbook and Photo Journalism. They should add to the story, build on the informational aspect, and get names into the copy. To get good quotes, you must ask good questions and then pull good answers out of your interviewee.

EXAMPLE STORY - WEEKENDS Since you’re writing a story with quotes for this assignment, I’ll model an example story about weekends. FIRST, you must make educated guesses on what weekends mean for students your age: The days are less structured You can be alone, with friends, or around strangers You can go to the movies, a concert, a party, a friend’s house, to work, to church, to a relative’s home, etc. What does this tell you about weekends?

EXAMPLE STORY - WEEKENDS SECOND, you need a set of questions that will help you get good answers from people you interview. Even with a set of questions, it is crucially important to keep the interview conversational. You must be interested in what your interviewee is saying! Sample questions for our example story: 1. What do you do on a typical weekend? 2. What is your favorite weekend activity? 3. What is your least favorite activity? 4. Where do you go? Who do you go with? What’s the first thing you do when you get there? 5. Do you have a curfew? What time is it? Do you keep it? Are you embarrassed by it? 6. How much do you usually spend on a weekend? Are weekends more expensive than weekdays? How much?

EXAMPLE STORY - WEEKENDS Question 1 – What do you do on a typical weekend? “Oh, I go home from school and take a nap or watch TV until about 6:00. Then I get up and get ready for whatever I’m doing that night. On Saturday, I help my mom with the housework before I can get out of the house. That means I have to get up kind of early if I want to have enough time to do anything with my friends. Sunday, I go to church, go out to eat lunch with my family, and then do homework.”

EXAMPLE STORY - WEEKENDS For most of us, that would be the end of question one. But we can do better! What do you usually do on Friday nights? “Usually, it’s more causal than Saturday nights which are usually the party nights. I’ll usually get together with friends and go to a movie or drive around for a while.” Drive around for a while? “Yeah, we just drive up and down Highway 6 looking for people we know or that we’d like to know. We look for hot guys to chill with. It’s nothing formal or anything like that.”

EXAMPLE STORY - WEEKENDS Saturdays are more planned? “Yeah, I guess because people need the day to get ready for a party or something like that. You can always get people to come over and help you get ready on Saturday.” Get ready? “You know, figure out where to go eat, move furniture around, stuff like that.” Is Sunday always so routine? “Pretty much. My parents expect me to go to church and I really don’t mind. I have friends from school who go to our church. I do have to eat with them on Sundays though. I’m not home much during the week and I’m out on Friday and Saturday nights, so I really don’t mind my Sunday commitments.”

EXAMPLE STORY - WEEKENDS See how much you can get out of ONE question? You may not always get a talkative person. If you get a lot of “yeah, pretty much” or “I don’t know. It’s whatever”, ask HOW, WHY, or WHAT do you do when…. happens. The real key is listening and asking follow up questions, repeating words and making them expand on an answer.

BASIC QUOTATION RULES Make sure they are correct. Clean up grammar Add a word or two to make a complete sentence Delete a word or two to help the flow Don’t use quotes to give facts. “The band raised $200 with pizza sales,” is a fact. Instead, do it this way: “The sale wasn’t nearly as successful as we hoped. By the time you factor in all the man hours we put into it, we made less than a dollar an hour. Next year, we’ll sell something else.” Make sure the transition between the quote says something different than the quote itself. The band pizza sale was not very successful. They figured out that is was an ineffective use of man hours. “The sale wasn’t nearly as useful as we’d hoped,” band president Laurie Schneider said. “By the time you figure out all the man hours, we made less than a dollar an hour.” Instead, do it this way: While the band made $200 profit on pizza sales, not everyone was happy with the event. “The sale wasn’t nearly as successful as we’d hoped,” band president Laurie Schneider said. “By the time you figure out all the man hours, we made less than a dollar an hour. Next year, we’ll sell something else.”

BASIC QUOTATION RULES Break up long quotes with attribution (who said it). Use the word “said” instead of other attributions. Try to get three good quotes per story.

BASIC QUOTATION RULES Quotes should say more than what is expected. “I can’t believe we won.” - Bad “If we’d have scored one more touchdown, we would have won.” – Really? “Homecoming was lots of fun.” It was? Never use “when asked.” Don’t write “When asked why they decided to sell pizza, band director Jim Stetson said…” Instead, write “We decided on pizza sales because it has been a good fundraiser in the past, said band director Jim Stetson. “Maybe the market was over-saturated. We didn’t realize…” If you discover a quote that could lead to more information or raised other questions, GO BACK AND GET MORE!

INTERVIEWING IS IMPORTANT When your interview is done, go through and highlight the best answers from your interview and figure out how to write your story. As a class, we need to know how to interview people so that those of you who take the next step into the Yearbook class next year will have this skill.

ASSIGNMENT: INTERVIEW STORY Your assignment is to select a topic below and interview a class member. You must have at least FOUR good quotes in your story and the total length must be TWO pages, double spaced with 1 inch margins and 12 pt font (Calibri, Cambria, Tahoma, or Times New Roman). Title it [last name] Interview Quote Story [period], save to your H drive, and submit via Google Drive by the end of class on Friday, September 15th

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