During my freshman year in high school, I volunteered for the school newspaper. My first assignment was to interview the director of the autumn musical, who was somewhat amused as I tried rather mechanically to ask him questions that would elicit useful answers to the journalist's five basic questions, the so-called Ws-who, what, when, where, and why. The all-knowing managing editor of the paper-he was a junior and all of seventeen years old-had taught me the importance of those questions just days before I set out on that interview.
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