• By Jason Bacot
• Published 02/23/2011
• Writing

In the course of your professional life, you may be asked to write a custom essay. You may be asked to write a piece for a general interest newspaper or magazine. If your company has a newsletter, you may be asked to contribute a custom essay for one of the issues. Or you may be asked to write for an industry-specific publication, such as a magazine that is published for those in your particular line of work. If the thought of writing a custom essay fills you with dread, it shouldn’t. After all, you are being asked to share your knowledge, something that it has probably taken many years for you to acquire. You have the expertise, you just have to organize it and get it into an essay format, which will usually be a piece of around 500 words. The first task in writing a custom essay is finding out about the publication for which you will be writing. Your goal is to identify who the audience for your words is. If you are writing something for a newspaper, chances are you will be writing for a general audience that is literate, but that will not know the industry-specific terminology you may use every day. If you are writing for a company newsletter, then your audience will be schooled in your particular corporate culture, and you should write your essay accordingly.

If you are asked to write an essay for an industry or technical publication, then you can safely assume that the audience

has a basic knowledge of the field’s fundamentals, and will know at least some of the terminology commonly used in it. Identifying your audience is the first step in writing a successful custom essay. Before you begin writing, it is a good idea to speak with the editor of the publication to get a better idea of what they want. Do they want an opinion piece? Do they want an essay that will educate the audience on some important issue? Do they want an overview of what you do? Do they want your industry’s take on some current event? Finding this out in advance will make the process go much smoother. The whole idea behind writing a custom essay is to give the editor and audience what they are looking for. This doesn’t mean “telling them what they want to hear,” but it does mean making an honest effort to get the audience from point A to point B and to send them away with knowledge they did not have before reading your essay.

The key to writing a successful custom essay is finding out the requirements of the essay and delivering them in a coherent, concise format. Make the editor’s job easier by thoroughly proofreading and editing before turning in your essay. If possible, have a trusted colleague read your essay and offer constructive criticism beforehand. And always turn your essay in by the deadline. You’ve been asked to write a custom essay because you are believed to have something worthwhile to say. It’s a great opportunity to increase your professional esteem, so don’t panic and give it your best.