By Kathleen Doheny
If you’ve interviewed anyone with an M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H. or Sc.D. after his or her name, you know: It’s often no easy feat to get your sources to speak in everyday language.
You start off the interview asking a simple, straightforward question. “Dr. Quinn, could you tell me what the major finding is from this study on diet and breast cancer risk and why it is important for our readers to know about?”
And Dr. Quinn gives a reply that, should you actually use it verbatim, is bound to make your editor cry, at best.
“The investigation that I did, along with Dr. Smith – you can fit his name in, right? – is the first longitudinal study ever conducted in a multinational population of women without a familial risk of carcinoma of the breast that looks retrospectively at the role of diet and the risk of ER-negative breast cancer while taking into account all potential confounders.”
Whew. Some of that quote may fly if you’re writing for a publication aimed at doctors, but not for a consumer reader audience.
To coax – OK, extract – more English out of sources, I’ve found a few strategies that can help.
Warm them up. Instead of delving right into the interview, I’ll ask the source how their day is going, how the weather is in Boston or if this is still a good time for them to talk. I make it short and pithy – you don’t want them to think you called to chat, but if you’re personable they may be more likely to talk to you like they’d talk to someone without a doctorate or medical degree. I’ve learned to use common sense here. If it’s the dead of winter and Boston’s just had a blizzard, I may ask how the source made it through, without mentioning the temperature in Los Angeles, where I’m based.
Offer a blueprint for the interview. The source already knows what website or publication I’m interviewing him or her for, but I give them a brief rundown of the readers. (“Our readers are primarily health-conscious women with children.”) I also mention that many of our readers don’t have advanced degrees and so I need to write in ”everyday” language without compromising the medical accuracy. That last phrase is crucial, I think.
Coach ’em. As the interview proceeds, if I’m still getting quotes with too many cohorts and p values, I try to improve the quotes – with the help of the sources. Try this: “That’s a really good point, Dr. Quinn. Can we make a few of these words more everyday?”
Using ”death” instead of ”mortality” is usually OK’d without a hitch. So is subbing ”taking factors into account that might affect risk” instead of confounders.
Once they agree with the everyday language, some may still feel uncomfortable. At that point, I offer to read back the quote with the everyday language.
At this point, I’ve had some sources really get into the ”everyday language” goals. Recently, one source worked to make a quote less jargon-y. After he gave another answer, he asked: “How’s that? How am I doing?”
Bravo for that M.D.-Ph.D. competitive mindset!
Switch to the Starbucks strategy. So you’ve warmed them up, you’ve reminded, you’ve coached. And the source is still all-science-y all the time. At that point, I try the java approach. “If you were standing in Starbucks, and were trying to tell the stranger in back of you the ‘big news’ of your study, what would you tell them, in just a sentence or two?”
Feel their angst. I think many sources talk in six-syllable words (multifactorial, anyone?) because they want to look and sound good to their peers. It’s an understandable concern. If I’m still getting that vibe at the end of the interview, I’ll say, “I think we have captured the gist of your research without simplifying it too much.” If they don’t agree, they’ll likely jump in here.
Punt & paraphrase. If none of these strategies work, or work well enough, you can always paraphrase, boiling down those multisyllabic words and phrases into lingo that will satisfy not only your editor but the reading level grade test.
Kathleen Doheny is a Los Angeles-based journalist who writes about health, fitness, behavior and car safety. She writes for HealthDay, WebMD, Edmunds.com, Senior Planet, cancerandcareers.org and other publications. In her spare time, she jogs, hikes and rarely declines a party invitation.
