A survey is a set of written questions that you ask your audience to answer in advance of your speech. Surveys allow you to ask your future audience members direct questions about topics related to your speech. If the audience is small—let’s say thirty or fewer—try to survey all of them. If it is larger, you may want to survey a smaller, representative sample.

Three general types of questions typically appear in a survey—fixed-response, scaled, and open-ended.

A fixed-response question—such as a true/false, multiple-choice, or select-all-that-apply question—gives your respondents a set of specific answers to choose from. Fixed-response questions are useful for gaining concrete insights into an audience’s experience with or views on a topic. For example, imagine that Megan, a student, wanted to give an informative speech on why visiting the dentist is a good idea (partially to convince herself!). She could ask fixed-response questions to find out if audience members have any experience with dental care or even to learn about potential for common ground because some audience members could also be nervous about dentist visits.

A scaled question measures the intensity of feelings on a given issue by offering a range of fixed responses. The ranges vary. They can take the form of a numerical scale (for example, from one to ten for lowest to highest) or a list of options (including “strongly agree,” “agree,” “neutral,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree”).

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Determining the intensity of your audience’s feelings about a topic can help you determine their prior exposure and disposition. For her speech on visiting the dentist, Megan sought to discover the extent to which pain influenced people’s attitudes about visiting the dentist. If her classmates were very frightened by the prospect of pain, she could focus her points on advances in dental anesthesia and new teeth-cleaning technologies that lessen uncomfortable scraping.

An open-ended question invites respondents to write an answer of their choosing, rather than offering a limited set of responses. For such a question, Megan might ask respondents to describe any problems they have had with dentists.

Open-ended questions can help you identify issues you might not have otherwise considered or covered in your other questions. If Megan thus wanted to know the range of dental problems her audience members had experienced, she could best find out through an open-ended question.

Open-ended questions also allow respondents to communicate in their own words. With fixed-response questions, it’s possible that none of the options accurately describe the views of a specific audience member; open-ended questions allow each person to state an individual, nuanced answer.