I often think of Miss Mitchell, my 10^th grade English teacher. She showed up the first day, wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, faded jeans, and needing a haircut. We instantly trusted her. She taught us that the first rule of writing was to know your audience. She constantly prodded us to think about who we were writing for. This was long before Usability and Information Architecture were trendy buzzwords, but what they mean is to think about who will actually be consuming the words we put out. (I can’t believe I learned something this useful in high school.)

Miss Mitchell certainly knew her audience. She always dressed casually, used fun tricks to get us to write, and encouraged us with plenty of praise. How did she get to know us? She spent time talking to us, asking us to tell her about what we wanted to write.

Blogging is inherently a casual medium. By telling you silly stories to illustrate my points, I’m (hopefully) catching you off your guard. You might remember this later if it’s funny. But let’s face it, I’m trying to connect with a customer here, so I try to remember that when I write articles for this blog. I take seriously the comments and emails sent to me from this page, and these help me make sure that I’m writing what you want to read. It also works as a filter device for possible new customers, because if what I write here speaks to you, we have a good chance of working together successfully. It’s a high-tech and zero cost way of taking a customer for a cup of coffee. All the interactivity, and none of the caffeine.

In business writing, especially for the web, clever companies are increasingly using a low-tech tool to tell them what they want to know: focus groups. Using the feedback from test consumers previously unfamiliar with their product, they are able to create websites, training materials, technical manuals, and other materials that are tailored to the user / customer. There’s really no way around it: you have got to actually talk to your audience to find out what they want.

One my favorite examples of this comes from the original Muppet Movie. Fozzie Bear enters onstage in a rowdy bar, to perform his standup routine for a bunch of drunks and gamblers. He begins with, “I once knew a sailor who was so fat…” whereupon a very fat sailor stands up out of the crowd, smashes a bottle on the table, and says, “How fat was he?” Fozzie pales beneath his fur, and returns with, “He was so fat that he had lots of friends and everybody loved him.”

Unless you want to have your writing go over like a ton of bricks, it pays to check your output on a friend, especially if he happens to be green and have a snappy sense of humour.