The page Priya brought to the first review
Priya came to the course as a subject specialist who had agreed to host a recorded conversation with a colleague for a regional event. She had written twenty-two questions the night before and sent them to us for written feedback on her Module 2 assignment. Reading them, I could see that nearly all of them could be answered with a single word or a short fact. Did the project start in spring? Was the team large? Is the method widely used?
She was not careless. She knew the topic well, and that was part of the difficulty. Because she already knew the answers, her questions were really statements with a question mark attached. They checked whether the guest agreed with her, rather than inviting the guest to explain anything.
Her list also had no shape. Questions about history sat next to questions about results, then jumped back to early decisions. A viewer would have had to keep reorganising the story in their head while the guest tried to keep up.
Turning closed questions into open ones
Our first exercise in the module is simple to describe and harder to do. Take each question and ask what a stranger would need to hear in order to understand the answer. Priya rewrote her opening question from whether the project began in spring to what the situation looked like when the work began and what made it worth starting.
She did this for every line, and about half of them merged. Several of her original questions were really the same question approached from different sides. Combining them gave her a shorter list in which every item carried real weight.
What surprised her was that open questions did not make the guest ramble. They made the guest choose. When asked how the method came about, her colleague had to decide which part of the story mattered most, and that choice is exactly what makes an answer interesting to listen to.
- Replace whether and did with how, what and why
- Merge questions that circle the same point
- Cut any question whose answer you already plan to state yourself
Giving the list an arc
Once the wording was better, we turned to order. I asked Priya to write each question on its own slip and arrange the slips into a path a newcomer could follow: where things began, how they developed, where they stand now, and what comes next. She moved slips for about twenty minutes and ended with a sequence that read like a short story.
The arc did not need to be rigid. She marked three questions as essential and the rest as optional, so that if the conversation ran short she would know exactly what to keep. This is a habit we encourage because it removes the panic of watching the clock mid-session.
She also placed one gentle, easy question first. Guests are often more nervous than they admit, and an opening that lets them speak comfortably about something familiar sets the tone for everything after it.
Preparing follow-ups for a specialist guest
The part of Module 2 that Priya found most useful was the follow-up bank. For each main question, she wrote two or three short prompts she could use if the answer was thin, technical or surprising. Examples were things like can you give me an example, what would a beginner get wrong here, and what changed your mind.
Specialist guests tend to answer in the vocabulary of their field. A follow-up that asks them to translate, in plain words, for someone new to the subject often produces the clearest moments in the final recording.
She kept the follow-ups on a separate sheet, not mixed into the main list. That kept her main path clean while giving her something to reach for when a pause lasted too long or an answer needed unpacking.
- Ask for an example when an answer stays abstract
- Ask for the plain-words version when terms pile up
- Ask what went wrong when everything sounds smooth
What changed on the day she recorded
Priya told us afterwards that the session felt different from the first minute. She no longer read from the page. Because she understood the arc, she could listen to her colleague and decide in the moment whether to follow a tangent or return to the path.
Her colleague also seemed more at ease, partly because the guest brief from Module 1 had set expectations, and partly because the questions gave room to think. One answer ran nearly four minutes without interruption, and it later became the centre of a short excerpt.
She did not hit every question. Two optional ones were dropped, and a follow-up she had not planned came naturally from something the guest said. That, I told her, is the goal: a prepared host who is free to respond.
What to take from her case
Priya's experience shows that question preparation is less about writing clever lines and more about honest editing. Her first list was not wrong, only unfinished. It took one evening of rewriting, ordering and planning follow-ups to turn it into a working tool.
If you are preparing your own interview, try the same steps in the same order. Open the questions up, give them a path, mark the essentials and keep a separate bank of follow-ups. None of it requires special equipment, only time and a willingness to cut your own favourite lines when they do not serve the guest.
Priya's list began as a page of questions she already knew the answers to and ended as a short, ordered path with room to listen. The changes were modest: open wording, a clear arc, marked essentials and a bank of follow-ups. Anyone preparing an interview this autumn can work through the same steps in a single evening, and the recording will usually reward the effort.