As the interviewer, your job is to guide the conversation along, to direct it to those areas of greatest interest to your readers. However, you should never be so intrusive as to dam the flow of an interviewee's thoughts. You must be willing to improvise. Open-ended questions encourage lengthy answers, such as overviews, descriptions, opinions, and anecdotes. These questions often start with the words how or why .
Closed questions seek brief, specific answers.
Open-ended questions give the interviewee more control of the interview, while closed questions put you in charge. The most effective questions you can ask will either solicit specific information or encourage your interviewee to give you examples, anecdotes, details, or opinions. They are posed in such a way as to make you look inquisitive yet objective, firm but fair. Questions that begin with how or why . Questions that call for specific answers.