Want to know what your audience wants? Ask them!

Having worked at a software development company for 10 years, I saw first hand how valuable it is to gather information from customers about what they want in the product. Customer feedback is gold to any business. It's no different in the writing biz.

As a student, you may not see yourself as being in the "writing biz," but you are. As in business, writing is an important skill in school, and teachers read your writing to discover what you know about a subject. If you're in high school and you're not doing a lot of writing now, you should know that will change when you get to college. College teachers assign a lot of writing and not just in English classes.

As a teacher, I emphasize two keys to good writing: understanding your purpose for writing and analyzing your audience. Most writers are clear about their purpose for writing. Students may have to work harder for that clarity because their purpose is often provided to them by the teacher. That might sound counter-intuitive, but often it is harder to write to someone else's purpose than to your own. Whether you're a student writer or writing in business, however, knowing what your audience wants is extremely important and can often be difficult to determine.

Audience analysis usually consists of trying to guess what your audience knows and the style of writing that will appeal to them based on demographic factors like their expected age, gender, income, and education. We want to create material that will appeal to our audience and persuade them to take our point seriously.

Often in class, as in business, we are asked to choose a topic that will interest our audience. As writers, we might spend a lot of time guessing what topic that might be. But perhaps we're missing an easy answer to our problem. Why not ask our audience?

As a business writer, I have often asked my bosses what evidence they would find compelling for say, a proposal. Most of the people I've worked for are interested in hearing new ideas for how to accomplish some goal, and they are more than willing to spend a couple of minutes sharing with me what criteria they will use to assess my ideas. Similarly, as I mentioned earlier, businesses often ask their customers what they'd like to see in their products. Students, however, rarely ask their professors and fellow classmates what they would find interesting in an essay.

Perhaps we think that to ask someone what they want and then to give it to them is somehow not right. Other people might accuse us of brown-nosing or being a teacher's pet. We may, ourselves, feel that we should be able to figure it out on our own. But take some time to really think about it: what's wrong with asking people what they want?

So the next time you get a writing assignment in one of your classes and you're given some freedom to choose your topic, ask around. Ask your classmates what they'd like to read. Ask your teacher. You might not get a direct answer. You might have to dig a little. In fact, maybe you could try offering some options, "would you rather read about this or that?" The key is to give it a try. You might just save yourself a lot of valuable guessing time.