Purpose of your interview

Assume you are employed as a counselor at your local high school. You need to conduct a 30-minute interview with a student who has suddenly had a dramatic decline in her grades. Prior to conducting any interview, it is extremely important to plan its structure, the type of information you hope to acquire, the timing and sequencing of the interview, and the types of questions you might want to ask. To prepare for the interview, analyze the structure of the interview and present a summary including the following reasons for your choices:

 

• Purpose of your interview
• Discuss the topics you plan to cover and the sequence in which you will cover them
• Questions you will use to obtain the information
• Opening techniques to build rapport with the volunteer
• Types and examples of questions you want to avoid

In your discussion, please be sure you cite, at a minimum, the online course and the text book for the course. Your paper should be 2–3 pages (not counting the cover and reference pages), be APA formatted, and include a reference page.

Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s ideas without giving proper acknowledgment. The term “plagiarism” includes, but is not limited to, the use, by paraphrase or direct quotation, of the published or unpublished work of another person without full and clear acknowledgment. It also includes the unacknowledged use of materials prepared by another person or agency engaged in the furnishing or selling of term papers or other academic materials.

The Modern Language Association’s MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers defines plagiarism as follows:

repeating another’s sentences as your own,
adopting a particularly apt phrase as your own,
paraphrasing someone else’s argument as your own,
presenting someone else’s line of thinking in the development of a thesis as though it were your own.

In short, to plagiarize is to give the impression that you have written or thought something that you have in fact borrowed from another.

Appearance

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.

Please number the pages of your essay (except for the title page).

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

Final check list

Before handing in your paper, please check the following items:

The pages are numbered.

The paper includes citations and a bibliography.