writing

How NOT to Write for Medium

for Questionality or any other pub

Photo by Beku Kanomi on Unsplash

[FriendLink so non-members can read for free.]

As editor of two pubs on Medium, Questionality and Musicality, and as a reader of many others, and of self-published posts as well, I am becoming increasingly aware of a common problem which could be easily remedied, if people just would.

Namely, a lack of proofreading.

Along with a lack of following Medium’s rules.

So, I’ve decided to address both of these problems in one essay. Here goes:

My number one bugaboo as an editor is receiving (and trying to edit) submissions that obviously have not been proofread. 1. Words with letters missing, or reversed. 2. Sentences that end with no punctuation whatever. No period. No question mark. No exclamation point. Nothing. Just blank space. 3. The use of a hyphen when a dash is required. 4. The opposite of that. 5. Missing quotation marks. One at the beginning, or one at the end, of a quote. But not both. So you can’t tell where the other end is. (And the same problem with parentheses.) 6. Commas where there should be no punctuation at all. 7. A total lack of punctuation where there should be some. 8. Uncapitalized first letter of the first word of a sentence. (e.e.cummings was a poet, not an essayist!) 9. The use of ‘its’ when you meant ‘it’s,’ and vice versa. And similar other incorrect use (or non-use) of the apostrophe. 10. The use of only a single comma in situations where there should be a comma pair.

Et cetera. The list could (and does, at least inside my head) go on and on.

Yes, I know it’s my job as editor to catch stuff and fix it. But there’s a limit to the amount I can handle in that regard, and to what you should expect me to do in that regard. Before you ask me to do it, you should feel a tiny bit of obligation to try to catch stuff yourself! Carelessness in this regard implies that you really do not care, and, if you don’t, why should I?

There’s a very simple fix for this, even if you don’t know how to proofread your own work. (I admit, it can be difficult at times, because the same brain that made the mistake to begin with — namely, yours (or mine) — is not going to always catch the mistake the second go-round. Or even the third.)

Here’s a step by step process of how to fix the problem:

1. Don’t type the body of your post directly into Medium’s ‘Write’ tab. I repeat, Don’t. Medium has no spell checker, no punctuation checker, no usage checker, no grammar checker. Whatever you type in is going to stay that way till you fix it, yourself. Yes, I realize, you do need to enter the title and subtitle manually, and the kicker if you have one, for reasons mentioned below, but you should limit such directly typed entry to those items.

2. Create your first draft, no matter how rough or smooth, by typing it into a word-processing app of some sort. The most common is MS Office ‘Word,’ but that costs money, and there are several good free alternatives. My own favorite is LibreOffice, which not only provides a word processor (called Writer Document) but a spreadsheet creator (called Calc Spreadshet, similar to MS Excel), and the free equivalent of all the other Microsoft expensive Office varieties as well, including a Power Point analogue. All absolutely free. Plus which these can be created in LibreOffice and then opened in MS Office!!! Or vice versa! There are many other free alternatives out there. You don’t have to buy anything: Grammarly or ProWritingAid or anything else. So being strapped financially is no excuse for submitting mistake-filled writing. And neither is not knowing how to do it yourself.

3. When you’re finished creating (on the Write tab) the title, subtitle, and kicker (if any), simply go to your draft, copy it from the app where you created it, and paste it into the Medium doc you’ve already started.

But wait, you’re not done. You’re not ready to submit yet.

4. Make sure you’ve followed the Medium formatting rules: a. You must have a title. When you first start a new Medium doc, the first line you type will automatically become the title. You don’t have to tell it to be that. b. You should have a subtitle. They’re not going to ban you if you don’t, but they strongly prefer that you do. Otherwise the first line of the body of text will show up as the subtitle in the little ‘preview’ icon that is automatically created for people to see while searching. And don’t depend on the ‘Title’ and ‘Subtitle’ from your word processing doc to automatically become the Title and Subtitle of you Medium doc. They won’t. As I already said, you need to type your title into the first line that comes up when you click on the Write tab. Unfortunately, the subtitle is not so simple. True, you must type it in, right below the title. But then you must highlight it and selext the small capital T on the black ribbon that appears. That small T means that the highlighted words are now the subtitle. After you hit Return, it will show as such. (To create a ‘kicker,’ if you want one, you follow exactly those same steps on the line above the title. Even though it’s a kicker, you highligt and select the small T as though it were a subtitle, and after you click elsewhere or hit Return, it will show up above the title with the word Kicker in front of the word or words you typed.) c. You must have an illustration. Either as the very next thing or somewhere not too far down the first page. If you are getting the illustration from Unsplash, you click on the second icon in the display that shows up when you click in the circle to the left of the plus sign on the line below the subtitle. If you are getting it from any place else, you click on the first icon, and upload the illustration from wherever you created it or found it. You then click on the illustration in the doc, and a small line will show up immediately below the illustration, which is where you type the source. You can just say it’s a photo you took yourself (if that’s the case) or that you created it by painting or drawing it yourself, or by the use of an AI image generator (though you need to say which one, in that case). Or if you found it elsewhere online, other than in Unsplash, you need to say where you got it. Even if it’s in the public domain, you still have to say where you got it. [Note — you can have additional illustrations, as many as you like, but you must have at least one, and each one must be treated in just the same way as outlined above.] d. Wait! You’re not done with the illustration yet, unless it came from Unsplash or or was something you created yourself. If you got it anywhere else online, you must copy the ‘path’ to where you got it from, click on the illustration, do a Command-K [for Mac, or Control-K for Windows] there, and paste the path into the little black box that shows up above the illustration. e. Now, finally, you’re ready to copy in the body of the text that (hopefully) you created elsewhere.

[Whew! Don’t blame me for the rules just given in number 4 here. They are Medium’s rules, not mine.]

5. Submit.

A couple of words of warning: No automated grammar, spell, punctuation, or usage checker ever created is perfect. After using such, it’s up to you to go through and look for any remaining errors and fix them. For example, when I first typed the line about ‘the same brain that made the mistake,’ above, I typed ‘mad’ rather than ‘made.’ LibreOffice didn’t catch it. Why? Because ‘mad’ is a real word and correctly spelled, and its use, while nonsensical, did not create a grammatical error. So it wasn’t flagged. I had to catch it myself. Part of my job as author. Not as part of my job as editor.

One of our authors recently pointed out to me that he could have submitted his article to many other places, where the editor would barely have read it, let alone actually edited it or corrected anything. I hope he’s wrong. But I fear, after reading some of the stuff that gets published on other pubs, that he may be right. But that’s their problem. And their readers’ problem. Yes, I will miss things from time to time that should have been corrected, and I apologize in advance for that lack. But I do try. And I do expect that authors submitting their work here will also try.

That’s part of what being an author means!

If this felt like a lecture, rather than a question, I’m sorry. But I didn’t know where else to publish it. So, just to keep things they way they’s supposed to be, here it is in question form:

‘How do I write something badly?’ There. Hope that covers the need! [Please notice the correct grammar!]