When you do media training for TV interviews, you learn some of the tactics for avoiding difficult questions. I'm speaking about
- deflection
- bridging
- deferring
These skills are key when you face high-level interviews on media.

Deflection is usually the easiest.

Q: Didn't you say Bitcoin was going to keep rising to $100k?
A: That's one thing I actually wanted to talk about. We are pretty rigorous with our research. In fact, recently, we upgraded our research platform with an AI System...
Bridging as the name implies means you connect from the question and move away to what you want to focus on. The emphasis on connecting the question to your answer is the key difference with deflection, which takes a sharp turn away from the question right from the beginning.
Q: Categorically, do you believe Nigeria can solve its power issue?
A: Categorically speaking, Nigeria's problem with power needs a proper definition. Is it Generation or transmission or tariffs? or Financing or a lack of political will? I think if we take the telecoms ndustry...
Deferring is the default practice for non-comms people when faced with a question about their company or a subject they don't want to talk about. This involves notifying the interviewer that there is someone better equipped to answer and that your response does not represent..
the views of the organization or group.

Q: So, at what point does XYZbank intend to raise more capital to achieve more growth across their operations?
A: Thanks for asking however I believe our investor relations teams have a press release/briefing that better answers this.
Then you can bridge to something else.

A: ...however like most banks, we are keen to tap into the emerging themes across the region. I think banking as a whole is set for a major paradigm shift in the retail space. Fintechs, Cryptocurrencies, Big Data are all exciting themes...
Speaking to media is usually a stressful event for many but there are ways to overcome that stress and have a good interview.

1) Practise your intro. The likelihood of a bad interview starts with how you respond to that first question/comment - 'Thanks for joining the show...'
I have a standard 'Thanks for having me'. Find out what works for you. Keep it brief and simple. The interviewer wants to get on with the show as fast as possible and will often interrupt if longer. Practice that intro.
2) Match the interviewer's energy. When you are able to achieve this, the chemistry tends to make for a really great interview. Your interviewer would likely not be laid-back and speaking in a low register, so you shouldn't (except you're a politician - different class for this)
3) Keep the answers short. State your most critical point first then expand. If you have time, add more points. You don't always have time to build an argument with minor logic and precepts that crescendo into a main conclusion.
On a more preparatory tone, dress well and request questions or an area of focus from the interviewer to avoid those difficult situations, when you will have to deflect or otherwise. If there's time, the interviewer will circle back to the question and you have to still answer.

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
Last month I presented seven sentences in seven different languages, all written in a form of the Chinese-character script. The challenge was to identify the languages and, if possible, provide a


Here again are those seven sentences:

1) 他的剑从船上掉到河里去
2) 於世𡗉番𧡊哭唭𢆥尼歲㐌外四𨑮
3) 入良沙寢矣見昆腳烏伊四是良羅
4) 佢而家喺邊喥呀
5) 夜久毛多都伊豆毛夜幣賀岐都麻碁微爾夜幣賀岐都久流曾能夜幣賀岐袁
6) 其劍自舟中墜於水
7) 今天愛晚特語兔吃二魚佛午飯

Six of those seven sentences are historically attested. One is not: I invented #7. I’m going to dive into an exploration of that seventh sentence in today’s thread.

Sentence #7 is an English-language sentence written sinographically — that is, using graphs that originate in the Chinese script. I didn’t do this for fun (even though it is fun), or as a proposal for a new way to write


I did it as a thought experiment. Why? Because thinking about how the modern Chinese script might be adapted to write modern English can give us valuable insights into historical instances of script borrowing, like those that took place centuries ago in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

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