The Role of Silence in a Taped Interview
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A long pause on a recording can feel, to an inexperienced interviewer, like a failure, something to be filled quickly with another question. Experienced interviewers tend to do the opposite instead, treating silence as a working part of the conversation rather than a gap to be closed as fast as possible.
Speakers often use pauses to decide how much to say, or how exactly to say something difficult they are working through. Interrupting that silence too soon can cut off exactly the sentence the pause was building towards, leaving behind a thinner, more guarded answer in its place than what might otherwise have emerged given time.
Reviewing a transcript later, the pauses themselves sometimes carry as much information as the words around them. They mark precisely where a story became harder to tell, information a purely written account would never be able to capture at all without that context preserved alongside it.