Why Writers have to Listen first?

All of this doesn’t make sense to you in the first go, but the very problem is that in your head, you just didn’t let me go any further. You read the first few lines and perhaps cast a perception in your head about the content you would be reading here. Of course, the header talks about active listening, so most of you, if not all, had preconceived a read-only about things that would talk about active listening. And therefore, your mind was poised to read or rather hear something about the topic. But even when reading information or any form of content, decluttering your mind is quintessential to understanding that written piece's essence.

Now, a major portion of the blame can be conveniently put on our oddly wired human brains. Turns out our brains have the capacity to process up to 400 words per minute of information. But even the fastest rapid-fire speaker can also deliver only around 125 words per minute. That means our brain is idle for roughly 75% of the time someone is talking to us. This shows our brain craves some activity or motion in its most normal stage of existence.

Secondly, literacy in communication tends to bend towards bettering ways to speak your opinions to others efficiently in practice. The overall education is around how well you can talk, write, or, worse, mime out to tell others what information you want to pass on to them. Even if the soft skill trainers mention in passing how one should be a good listener, very few really care to coach others in becoming good ‘listeners.’ And I believe this in itself is the fruit of not ‘listening’ to the need or hunger of the mass.

The third major reason is the ever-amassing bulk of information that is now available for human consumption. Especially, the internet has allowed everyone to profess their opinions, ideas, and predilections in whatever shape and size they want. It drives the individuals to generate content frequently to garner more popularity and keep themselves up in the algorithms by achieving more likes, shares, and subscriptions. The success of these metrics is gauged in the amount of noise you’ve created and not in terms of the sense that has prevailed. This is where the need for listening gets lost, and the need to just talk or babble supersedes.

As copywriters, we take briefs from our clients or stakeholders who want us to deliver their projects. When the brief is shared, active listening plays a pivotal role in grasping the crux of the content requirement. But, did you know the process of active listening occurs in not-so-rigidly defined stages? We move swiftly through these stages in our minds, but we are elaborating it out to understand the process better. It might take a while to incorporate this into our client’s briefing sessions, but it would not take too long to become a habit with time and due effort.

One of the biggest markers of passive listening is that almost nothing is remembered. Y going through the earlier stages. Nevertheless, it won’t cost you even a paisa to take a moment to recollect and login information to your mental archive after any important briefing sessions. This will help you rumiBut hey, the good news is that you’ll automatically start remembering things mentioned in conversations better by going through the earlier stages. Nate on the information with much more exactitude.

As copywriters or content marketers, we need to be attentive to our clients to gather the right information. Apart from deliberately walking through these stages, you could follow few other tips to up your game:

Listen to your audience: If possible, try to talk to people you target using your content. If not directly, try developing profile personas to understand how their reactions would look like.
Catch the lingo: To get the message across, especially for social media platforms, listening to the trending pop cultural references and lingo does a great deal of help in writing the right content.
Listen with your eyes and ears: Even while reading a brief, to read between the lines, it is necessary to read the lines first. Sanitize your head of all the preset responses and then listen to the message afresh.
Don’t be judgmental: Murder your own biases. Yes, as harsh it sounds, our biases need to be treated likewise. They cripple our content from striking home with the audience.
Take notes religiously: C’mon, you are a scribe, so hit the pen against the paper and let it all be there for you to go back to. For it is the gospel truth that it’s too easy to remember what you think someone said, not what they actually did

So is it actually indispensable to train ourselves to be better listeners? Yes, because when content fails to serve the purpose, when ad campaigns crash, or the UX content does not push the user’s experience north, remember they all reflect on the market share and balance sheet. Only honing our skills as listeners will help us gain more authenticity, resonance, and engagement with our written content. So, let us all fervidly pledge to be active listeners than just machines rolling out unpalatable word cakes. Fin! Okay, don’t mind my dramatics, but take the baby and conscious steps to listen and let there be more sound content in the world.