A complete step-by-step guide

Curation Guidelines — In Simple Words

A step-by-step guide to ensure further distribution

ILLUMINATION is in the top 1% of publications on Medium. Becoming the number 1 publication will depend on high-quality content that the readers can easily read and understand.

When you visit a publication, you don’t read every story. You are looking for an interesting story. ILLUMINATION curation procedures will be used to review every story for its quality depending on the criteria outlined in this guide.

When the readers are confident that every story has a high-quality, they’ll spend more time reading and less time judging the quality by skimming and skipping. ILLUMINATION will help every one of its writers to achieve this high writing standard.

The ILLUMINATION curation process is based on real human beings. Thirty-plus editors read and vote for the quality of the story. It is a completely transparent and objective process.

The ILLUMINATION editors also work with high potential stories to make them better — it is similar to the conventional publishing process. They provide suggestions and insights, and you may choose to comply with their tips.

After reading the directions detailed here, writing a high-quality story is a matter of practice. We have provided advanced-story-templating techniques and a guide to fully grasp the concepts of quality writing to help you in your journey to become a better writer.

What is ILLUMINATION curation?

ILLUMINATION has more than 35 editors who will read and vote for your stories to curate them for a wider audience looking for a quality reading experience.

Medium distributes only those stories that meet their high editorial standards.

See the announcement by Dr Mehmet Yildiz.

Is the ILLUMINATION-Curated selection process helpful on Medium?

Yes. It is helpful because the selection of your story will not depend on algorithms but actual human beings. It is based on the agreed criteria and uses the level of rigor that peer-reviewed journals perform.

ILLUMINATION curation process is 100% objective. We do not curate based on our subjective taste. We believe that writers need objectivity for selection of their content for distribution.

If ILLUMINATION editors choose your story, it’ll be more likely that Medium will also choose it for further distribution. If it is not distributed by Medium, it means that their subjective criteria affect the outcome.

Medium distributes a story to its readers — on the homepage, on-topic pages, in an app, in the Daily Digest newsletter, and other emails.

ILLUMINATION will follow this model and extend it to amplify messages to a broader and a target audience at the same time.

ILLUMINATION-curated publication, empowered by the capabilities of ILLUMINATION main publication, is a paradigm shift for content curation, distribution, and marketing.

How Medium chooses stories for further distribution

Medium uses algorithms to find high-potential stories. The algorithms take the first look at your piece to decide if it is worth the human curator’s time.

Then, human curators read these machine-chosen stories. Curators do not review every story.

But you’ll see, as time passes, that the ILLUMINATION curation process will bring you more reading time — read as more financial reward — than the Medium distribution process.

Criteria for Curation — ILLUMINATION requirements

Step 1

1. Your story must be easy to read

You must use simple words that most of your readers can easily understand. You have to share your ideas as if you are telling a story. If your reader can read your story in a relaxed way, he or she will probably read it to the last sentence.

Your headline should be tailored to attract the reader’s attention — but the headline must not be clickbait.

If your first two paragraphs don’t capture your reader’s fancy, she is probably going to skip to the conclusion — or the takeaway.

If the conclusion is not packed with helpful tips and insights, she may quit reading the story.

2. Your story must meet high editorial standards

The story should be well-written. It should be easy to follow and free of errors. You must provide the sources of research. The story must be narratively strong, and its reasoning must be compelling.

You should never submit your first draft. You must edit your story to a point where you have removed all the unnecessary words, sentences, and paragraphs.

After writing the story, reaching a high editorial standard is the most challenging thing to do. You’ll have to rewrite some sentences and write some new sentences to correct the flow of your story logic.

The editors want the stories with which you have spent some time, and your story is not a journal entry written only for yourself.

3. Your story must have some value for the reader

The readers want new insights and fresh perspectives. Your story must offer an original and honest point of view. The reader should feel that she is getting some meaningful advice.

Your words should either touch the heart of the reader or her mind. She should feel that her emotions or her mind were engaged in an adventure while she was reading your story.

Boring stories don’t get a good average reading time. Writer earnings depend on the member reading time.

4. You must write for the reader

The story must connect with the reader — on an emotional, spiritual, or mental level — on an important issue. You must keep in mind that the reader is your customer. You have to satisfy your customer.

5. Your story should be complete

It has to have an inviting start, an engaging body, and a satisfying ending. It should be a well-considered polished piece of work. It should be concise.

There should be no loose ends. All questions, especially any posed in the headline, must be addressed.

6. Your story must be rigorous

Your story must hold up to scrutiny. Try to base your story on solid logic.

7. You must write honestly

When the reader reads, she should feel that the writer wrote it in good faith. You must not try to fool your reader with false premises or biased and controversial researches.

8. The reading experience must be good

Format your story for the web and mobile. The headline should be relevant to the topic. The body of the story should be easily readable.

9. Formatting

The formatting of the story should be according to ILLUMINATION submission guidelines. All the paragraphs, sentences, headlines, subtitles, and breaks should be nicely formatted. For details, please read the new guidelines:

Once your story is finished, select the three dots, then Add to publication first, then press Submit. Please don’t press the Publish button first and then Add to publication. The difference might seem trivial, but Medium’s internal procedures make submitting a draft much more effective in gaining readers for your story.

10. Your story must be clean

It has to be free from any typos and errors. You must proofread your story and check it for grammar.

You can use apps such as Hemingway and Grammarly for checking spellings and grammar.

11. The images must be appropriate

The images used in the story must be relevant and appropriate to the story. If you have used an image without rights, the curators may disqualify your article. Use photo’s from Unsplash, Pexels, or Pixabay. They are free to use.

12. Too-wide curiosity gap disqualifies your story

If you claim something in your headline, sub-headline, and feature image in a way that attracts the reader but you fail to satisfy the reader’s heightened interest, it is a case of a ‘too-wide curiosity gap.’

ILLUMINATION editors do not pick stories that claim to provide a particular type of information but then fail to satisfy the readers.

What Illumination editors look for in your story

Step 2

When editors find any of these qualities in your story, they start considering it for curation:

1. Fresh ideas: The editors want to find stories with original and creative ideas.
2. Unique perspectives: If the idea of your story is not unique, it must have a unique point of view.
3. Varied voices: If the idea of the story is not unique, and the perspective is also traditional, then it has to be at least written in your style.
4. Smart thinking: It refers to your ability to solve various life problems — using your knowledge and experience — faced by all of us at some point in our lives.

You can use free online software tools to help you edit, find appropriate words, compare drafts, check grammar, correct typos, and exclude jargon from your stories.

What your story must do

Step 3

Your story must do all of these three things — in some proportion that suits the theme of your story:

1. Entertain: It means that the reader should feel a sense of drama, thrill, or curiosity, right from the start and to the end. They must remain engaged while reading the story. It does not matter whether your story is a 2-minute read or an 11-minute read; it has to be entertaining.
2. Inform: This refers to facts and figures related to your story. The relevant information about the latest researches can also help to maintain the reader’s interest as well as give them the satisfaction of knowing more about their interests.
3. Educate: Your opinion in the story must have an educating effect on your reader. They should feel a bit wiser after reading your story. It should give them a message that improves their understanding of moral, ethical, environmental, or any of the other important issues related to living a good life.

For example, your story can be 33% entertaining, 33% informative, and 33% educating. It can also be 50%, 20%, and 30%.

But it must not be 100% informative with no entertainment or educational value. This kind of imbalanced approach will not lead to a good reading experience.

Advanced story templating techniques

step 4

(You can skip this step if your stories are frequently chosen for further distribution. Templating techniques will help you to write stories with a compelling narrative structure.)

Writing in your style is your right. But to follow the standards of Illumination and Medium, you may have to slightly change it — if your stories are not chosen for further distribution.

Story-templating could help you write stories that ILLUMINATION editors and Medium wants to further distribute. Story templating means that you pick any story on a topic page and use it as a template. It must be written by someone you like. Somebody you would want to emulate.

Usually, fiction writers use story templates for their writing. The writer presents a problem, it gets worse, and then after a long struggle, it is solved.

As a nonfiction writer, writing for Illumination, you can also use an initial problem, story, or question to explain how the issue may be a real-life problem for the reader. After asking the questions, you can share research, quotes, anecdotes, or insights to help the readers solve the problem.

Every successful writer uses a particular style to make his or her work appealing. When you want to emulate your favorite writer, don’t try to use their words or their original ideas in your writing. You may use the flow of writing in their stories appropriately:

The topic of your story should NOT be similar to your template.

Choose any topic you want. You can use a brainstorming session to list down the points that you want to write.

You can search the internet to find out more about your points. Note down — in no particular order — the related researches, quotes, or stories you may use while writing the story.

Steps for story templating

You have to follow these steps to write your piece:

1. Open the story you want to use as a template.

You can use any story — listed on a topic page — for this exercise. It’s better if you like the writer and her writing style. We naturally want to write like the writers we admire.

Read the story at least twice. It may take half an hour. Try to understand the article as a whole.

2. Match the heading

For example, I am going to use this story, as a template, with the headline: Ask Yourself ‘What Makes You A Good Writer?’

You have to choose your headline. For example, your headline may say: Ask Yourself, “What is Your Biggest Fear?”

Explanation

The story you selected was distributed in “Writing,” but you’d be writing about facing the biggest fears of our lives.

3. Match the subtitle

Our template story has this subtitle: Listening to your inner emotions can be your way ahead.

Now, you can write your subtitle, matching the spirit of the template: Facing your fears can lead you to your success.

Explanation

You can see that we are not copying ideas or using words of the template story. We are just matching the sentences and their flow of logic in an abstract way that agrees with our intuitions and creative ability.

4. How to write the main content of the story

Notice how your template story starts.

The template starts with an anecdote written by a famous writer. He describes an exciting event about how he tries to write using his emotions.

You can also start your story with an anecdote. But this anecdote must be related to your theme. For example, you could write the story told by Will Smith when he had to jump out of an airplane for skydiving.

See how logic flows.

The template story asks a question and then answers it. The writer describes her intuition about the writing process arising out of the tale she had narrated.

You can follow the same style and ask questions about the biggest fear of facing a human being. Use your personal experiences to move your story forward.

You can tell another anecdote or some research about how we try to avoid our biggest fears.

Notice how the writer expresses emotions.

The writer shares her own emotions about how she writes. You can express your fears and how you feel about them. It does not matter if you have overcome your fears or not — just narrate them with your insights.

Notice the length of the story.

By noticing the length of the story, you can see what every paragraph is trying to do. You must try to match the number of sections of your article to the template. But if your piece is a bit longer or a bit shorter, it doesn’t matter.

The power of the sentences must match.

As a writer, you can feel the power of a sentence. You have to craft your own sentences that match the power of the sentences written in the template story. You may not be able to rival fully. Some writers are just too good. In that case, you can always use quotes from famous authors.

If there is a conclusion, match it.

Notice how the conclusion summarizes the point or gives actionable steps. It is important. These days many readers would read your takeaways first. If they find anything interesting there, they may choose to read the rest of it as well.

These techniques are an advanced version of story templating. Initially, you may not completely understand them.

These techniques encourage you to write in an orderly way. If you follow the steps, you’ll see that it is not difficult to write stories that may be considered high potential stories for further distribution.

How to understand the concept of further distribution

Step 5

(You can skip step 6 if your stories are frequently chosen for further distribution. Understanding the underlying concepts will help you to write better stories. )

If you have ever taken an IQ test, you would know that it has a section where you have to pick the odd man out. Medium uses algorithms to sort out the stories.

The algorithms are based on the idea of picking the odd man out.

Most of the stories — that are written in a hurry — share a pattern of writing: they have a lot of grammar mistakes, typos, and flaws in sentence structure; the algorithm marks these errors — a functionality that you find in the paid version of Grammarly.

Then the algorithm checks for keyword density — if a lot of writers are writing about a topic, and all of them are using the same keywords and similar sentences — the algorithm does not choose that story.

But if a story has unique keywords and original sentences — a functionality similar to the program called Ludwig that matches entire phrases and sentences — the story is the odd man for the algorithm, and it chooses the story. These machine-picked stories are then queued for human curators to read and check for the quality and coherence of ideas. When the queues are long, you may experience delays before your story gets the message that it was chosen for further distribution.

These insights will help you to understand the Medium selection process:

Stand out from the crowd

Do something different. Think differently. Combine your creativity with your knowledge to see what happens.

The best way to stand out is by not writing with your head. Write with your heart, gut, emotions, intuition, faith, or any other feeling part of your body to let your writing touch the soul of your reader.

The algorithm loves uniqueness.

Define your writing voice

What are the feelings and insights that you are going to share? For example, would you be a logical and research-based writer who never says anything not in line with the established fields of knowledge or would you like to explore the gray areas near the edges and try to extend the boundaries of the human mind from time to time?

Would you be appealing mostly to the emotions of your readers and tell them a story that moves them?

If you chose a character, stick to it — but you have the freedom to change your voice later. Try your bio to match the complexity of your writing character.

Originality always stands out — be the odd man for the algorithm.

No judgment, no perfectionism

It does not matter if your story is for or against the widely accepted ideas. It does not matter if it is happy or sad. It does not matter if it is too bold.

If you judge yourself, you’ll push yourself towards perfectionism — thinking that it will make your writing better — but perfectionism is poison. The judgment also kills your curiosity.

Judgment and curiosity cannot live in the same place. ~Kathryn J. Lively

Your readers are the ultimate judges of your story. Pour your honest opinions and true feelings on the page as you write.

Original and creative stories — that are ultimately chosen for the curator’s eyes by the algorithms — cannot, by definition, be objectively tested as they are your ideas — existing only in your head and heart.

The editors of Illumination or the Medium staff don’t judge and don’t expect perfection.

Avoid vague writing

Avoid vague sentences — for your editors and the Medium staff. If you are trying to express a very complex idea, don’t squeeze it into one line. The readers and the editors would not be able to make sense of the sentence. Also, don’t use words that are not needed.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. ~ An article by William Zinsser

Editing as if you are rewriting

Does the story meet a high editorial standard? — Is it well-written, easy to follow, free of errors, appropriately sourced, narratively strong, and compelling?~ Medium

Illumination’s high editorial standard can be reached by editing as if you wish to rewrite your entire story. But this rewriting does not mean that you have to write a new piece — just be willing to rewrite the faulty sentences or change the flow of logic in some paragraphs to bring unity.

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. ~William Zinsser

The editors are bound by their job’s requirements to reject anything that is below the high editorial standard.

An increasing followership is a clear and objective measure for the fitness of your writing in Medium’s particular market place.

No matter what anyone else says, just know that further distribution and viral posts are the only tricks to accumulate more reading time and more followers.

These insights can open new doors in your mind. Once these tips find their way into the writing parts of your brain, like all the other relevant information, you’ll see that your distribution messages and followers will start increasing.

What disqualifies your story

Step 6

Stories have to comply with Medium’s Rules:

• Never post ads on Medium: This means no unacceptable embeds and images if you want your story to be selected for further distribution.

These are not allowed:

• Stories that spread hatred, false beliefs, wrong scientific claims, and thoughts of suicide.
• Stories that do not take a serious view of violence, abuse, or deaths. Violent or offensive imagery or videos are also not allowed.
• Stories that harass people.
• Plagiarism — including not giving citations of sources.
• Undisclosed affiliate links — This one is very serious; so don’t try to sell anything in the story if you want to get selected.
• Inappropriate nudity: It means nudity without context that feels awkward.
• Avoid publishing personal communications with anyone.
• Spamming is not allowed on Medium.
• Be careful about headlines. No headline, all-caps headline, typos in the headline, links in the headline, and clickbait will disqualify your story. The headline has to be in title case; the subtitle should be in sentence case.

Disqualifying story types

1. Stories about Medium are not selected by Medium, but ILLUMINATION may curate such stories as well.
2. Stories with sponsored content.
3. Erotica.

Disqualifying elements in a story

• Non-compliant CTAs, or promoting yourself in the story.
• You can promote yourself and your products or services in your writer's bio. If necessary, CTAs in the story should be under 40 words.
• Clipped stories — stories link to another site for the full version.
• Images must be from Nappy, Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, and the Gender Spectrum Collection. No copyright violation for images is allowed, and the editors will reject the story if it does not mention the feature image source.
• Stories that are mere rebuttals of an argument or a point of view are not allowed.

Please read these guidelines carefully

If you follow these guidelines and the writing advice offered here, you’ll be able to figure out the modern art of blogging and storytelling. With time, you’ll be successful in your writing career using ILLUMINATION as your online home.

‘Everybody falls the first time.’ It is from a scene in the movie, ‘The Matrix’; Neo stands at the top of a building and tries his first jump after Morpheus.

It is part of the learning process; you have to fail to succeed later.

Note: These guidelines are used to curate stories by ILLUMINATION as well as for further distribution by Medium. But ILLUMINATION does not use algorithms, only plain old human beings read and evaluate stories.

Please subscribe to my email list, and become a member of Medium to read more quality stuff.