Tip #16: How to avoid the one interview habit that kills great quotes
Hedging your answers during media interviews forces journalists to paraphrase your responses every time
In recent tips, I’ve written extensively about how to deliver great quotes. I haven’t focused on ways for interview answers to go wrong. In fact, there is one common habit among researchers that carries the potential to ruin even the most eloquent, insightful answer though.
Hedging.
No, I’m not talking about lawn maintenance or sports betting. Hedging during media interviews is the practice of qualifying your response to protect against misspeaking or overstating your insights. It might seem sensible to couch your statements about new research findings, but this caution is a double-sided shearer (Ok, no more lawn care puns).
As a journalist, I understand the importance of being accurate and avoiding overly declarative statements, especially when data shows new or unexpected findings.
But hedging in science and hedging in quotes are two very different things. And I’ve seen how researchers who hedge out of abundant caution can ruin otherwise excellent — and perfectly accurate — statements during media interviews.
For Tip #16, I’m going to show you how to avoid hedging your statements and ruining your otherwise highly quotable responses.
Want to go beyond simple tips?
The Press Ready Science Interview Prep Worksheet walks you step by step through preparing for any media interview. In about 30 minutes, you’ll create a one-page cheat sheet you can actually use during the interview to deliver a killer quote.
It’s built to take your interview prep to the next level — for every single interview.
The Tip: How to stop hedging your answers
There are so many reasons to be tempted into hedging your answers during a media interview from nervousness to concerns over accuracy.
And adding caveats inside your responses is a perfectly understandable way to handle those concerns. But when you hedge
I have seen it so many times in my 10 years of interviewing doctors and researchers; a doctor will be halfway through a great explanation about the benefits of a new treatment based on the outcomes of their study, then pause and shift to talking about why it might not be perfectly settled science yet for reasons X, Y, and Z. The quote was excellent, until it swerved into the hedges (okay, last time, I promise).
As we’ve mentioned in other tips, the goal of these interviews is to provide your unique perspective and a few interesting quotes. Adding caveats is a terrible way to derail both of those goals. And journalists never include those hedging tangents in quotes. We’re always looking for concise quotes that tell the main story, and we usually just paraphrase the rest. So caveats and hedging statements are always paraphrased.
I even looked through my past articles for an example of hedging for this tip, but I couldn’t find one — either I or my editor removed those quotes. In short, hedging is a killer of great quotes.
With that in mind, here are three tricks you can use to avoid hedging your answers during media interviews.
First, trust yourself, trust the journalist.
I completely get the temptation to add caveats mid-answer. But it isn’t helping you or the journalist. This might be hard to hear, but the main issue with hedging is trust.
If you regularly hedge your answers, it might be because you don’t trust yourself to give an answer that hits all the right notes. On the other hand, it might be because you don’t trust the journalist who’s interviewing you. Maybe you think they don’t understand what you mean or how to explain your answers well in the article.
Here’s the thing though, journalists are trained to understand your statements as a whole, and we know how to pull representative statements out of an interview to improve our articles. So you can trust the journalists to do their job.
And you can certainly trust yourself to deliver a coherent and accurate statement about your own research without needing mid-sentence caveats.
Science is not something that can be solved in a single study, and journalists and their readers understand that your findings are one answer in that moment. No one who is serious about scientific research will hold your quote against you when things change a few months or years down the road.
So trust yourself to give a great answer without the caveats, and trust the journalist to understand that your answers are a snapshot of the current scientific landscape.
Second, pack your caveats.
We both know that you will have caveats and hedging to add to any study outcomes (limitations gets its own section for a reason after all). To avoid sprinkling the caveats into every answer you give to a journalist, pack them all into the beginning or end of your answer.
For example, if a journalist asks you about the main takeaways from your study, give your concise, clear, and highly-quotable answer first, then mention the caveats in one or two sentences at the end of your response.
This gives the journalist a clear set of statements to quote — ones that help tell the story of the study — as well as the key information they need to explain the findings in more context. Journalists are happy to paraphrase more technical explanations in their writing, but we really need to add your insights to the story in the form of quotes.
I’m not asking you to throw caution to the wind, just hold the caveats for the end. You’ll find that your insights are stronger, your quotes are better, and the coverage of your research will still feel complete — even without the mid-sentence hedging.
Finally, give the hedges some sunlight (I couldn’t help myself).
One of the big issues with hedging language in interview answers is the down beat tone they bring to the story. Journalists don’t cut out and paraphrase caveats to avoid or diminish them — quite the opposite.
We write about caveats separately (usually without quotes) because we want to explain what they mean about the study findings specifically and why they are a perfectly natural part of the process.
Researchers often add those caveats in a tone that almost sounds like an apology. If you feel that your caveats need to be mentioned in the same breath as the findings, then don’t hold back: explain why the caveats are important, talk about how the caveats are part of the main takeaway of the study, or highlight why the caveat has to be mentioned alongside the findings.
Give those caveats their moment in the sun. You can explain them as a feature of the research — maybe they are helping you develop your next hypothesis or maybe they are shifting your research focus in an entirely new direction. When you take time to focus specifically on those hedges and caveats, you will sound more confident and you will deliver better answers.
So, if you can trust yourself — and the journalist — to pack your caveats or highlight them intentionally, then you will deliver better answers and more quotable statements during your next media interview.
Here’s to taking another step toward being press ready.
One more thing — before your next interview.
If you’ve ever hung up the phone and immediately thought “why did I say it like that” — this is for you.
The Press Ready Science Interview Prep Worksheet is a reusable 30-minute system that helps you walk into any media interview with your message locked, your nerves managed, and your best answers ready before the journalist asks a single question.
No more winging it. No more replaying and regretting your answers.