Twenty Questions
The most profound piece of advice that I heard from Ira Glass’s interview came in Part One. Here, he says that it is extremely important to keep the audience engaged by asking questions. I took it to mean that it is important to have an interactive broadcast. Maybe you don’t have to ask direct questions, but subtly make the audience wonder why something happened, or make them predict what might happen next. It’s certainly something that I did not consider when I started drafting my story. I was stuck thinking about how interesting my story was to me, not about what others would think of it. However, I believe that I can incorporate Ira’s advice on question asking into certain segments of my story, and help keep my listeners involved and interested in my story. It’s interesting, really, thinking about how to engage an audience with a piece. Certainly, with radio, the methods are different. In a visual medium, whether that be television, print, or some other option, simple aesthetic choices, like font style, font size, and inclusion of pictures for books and color, visual changes, etc. for TV can do the trick. SInce radio is not a visual method of information communication, we have to actively select ways to engage our listeners. Ira clearly believes that question-asking is one of the most essential and useful ways of involving one’s audience. We can also use musical/audio changes to engage the audience, but it’s important to remember the audience wants to think, and audio can’t really make them think as much as question-asking can. I wasn’t planning on inclusing questions as a part of my piece, but after hearing what Ira had to say, I think I’ll try adding some hypothetical quesitons as well as some answerable ones as I progress through my story.