Slow right down

I wanted to chat this week about the speed of talking in interviews. When a journalist is interviewing you/your client, of course it might feel a/ super exciting and b/ like you want to use the opportunity to reel off everything about the subject you're speaking on so you don't miss anything out.

But this can prove to be a bit of a headache for the journalist.

For my interviews, and for many of my fellow journalists, we’re often interviewing over the phone, or perhaps using Teams or Zoom, and most certainly with our earphones in and tapping away making notes on own computers or in a notebook (unless it’s a live interview, of course). What often happens is the interviewee speaks so quickly it’s difficult to type/write up what they’re saying and secondly, it’s hard to keep up and digest what they’re saying when they’re speaking at 50 mph, especially if it's on a subject we're not used to. Also, what often happens is people speak continuously, covering and switching between several points at once.

So, while the journalist will often ask for the interviewee to slow down, or repeat a point, I would advise anyone to speak slower and more concisely than you usually would. Pause. Breathe. Let the point sink in. Don’t rush to bring in lots of different points all at once or you could lose the journalist or the viewer/listener. 

Of course, there’s AI translation tools we could all use to make our lives easier but at the moment, most journalists are not using these on a daily basis when interviewing someone.