WRITING TIPS

Get Noticed on Medium in 2024!

Mastering titles and paragraphs from an 8x Boosted Writer

Let’s face it, we all want more reads on Medium — because that’s what ultimately pays off!

That’s why I’m here to provide a preliminary guide to getting more eyes on your work and teach you to avoid the mistakes I’ve made. Granted, there are no guarantees here — just like there are no guarantees in life! But these tips will help enhance your writing on Medium. They may even get you boosted. And believe me, I’ve struggled as much as anyone else, from getting read to getting boosted.

My crash course on Medium and 8 boosts from September through December

Little did I anticipate receiving those boosts. Although I had already joined Medium in 2021, I was perfectly happy in merely responding to other people’s stories. After all, I already had a few commitments in my academic publish-or-perish world, including a second book in the works.

It wasn’t until the unexpected death of a favorite cat that I decided to blog on a very temporary basis about the grieving process I underwent with each cat I had from childhood through adulthood. I was going to turn these stories into a book on cat loss.

Then fate intervened.

Frustrated and annoyed by the paltry number of views and claps, I started to wonder what was wrong. Why weren’t my cat articles drawing any attention — when cats were supposed to be a highly popular topic? What did it take to become a more successful writer?

A month later, I started exploring and joining publications. Slowly, by late July, I began to interact with other writers. And in late September, I received two boosts two days apart. Then came three more in October and another three in December.

You might say that the various pubs served as a crash course of sorts. Not only did I reap the advantage of getting more eyes on my work, but importantly, I discovered and appreciated many examples of successful Medium writing. It seemed that I had to unlearn nearly everything I learned as a 20+ year academic.

And it was from there that my style began to change.

In the meantime, I pored through a good many stories on writing for Medium, very few of which were actually helpful. One can only repeat “write shorter paragraphs,” “use section headings,” “do your research,” so often. Seriously, what use is any of this advice when there are no examples to show how or why something is effective?

This is why I’m sitting down to write this guide for Medium — and teaching you to start afresh.

Titillate with a catchy title

Let’s start with the title. A catchy title won’t necessarily draw attention to your article if the subject is not of interest to the reader, but it will probably draw more attention than a lackluster one.

Personally, I like puns, rhymes, and alliteration. Many of my boosted and non-boosted articles play with such elements: for instance, “The Skinny on Skinny-Shaming,” “Holiday Cheers, Holiday Tears,” “The Sounds and Smells of Classical Gas” (this title refers to 18th-century bathroom humor: and yes, there is such a song!), and “Winter Stews and Brews.”

I certainly tried to draw attention to an essay I had written on Peter Medak’s The Changeling. I could have used a thoroughly pedestrian one like “Reflections on The Changeling.” But instead, I pulled out one of the best quotes from the film, “Help! Help! Help!” (Naturally, I checked to see that no one else had used it.) This essay wound up getting boosted.

Ditto “A Ghosting we will go,” another boosted story. Again, I could have used a bland title like “The Rise of 18th-century Horror.” But I chose to echo the familiar 18th-century song, “A Hunting we will Go,” turning it into “A Ghosting we will Go.” Personally, I thought the rhyme and alliteration made it even better!

And no, you do not need a Ph.D. in English literature to arrive at these catchy titles. I’ve seen numerous other clever ones on Medium and elsewhere too, thinking to myself, “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?” This is where I could be said to suffer from Pen-is envy! (Or is it Pun-is?)

Shorter paragraphs are key

With titles out of the way, let’s move on to paragraph structure, the backbone of your story. The formatting of your paragraphs can determine whether readers want to read your article — or not. Blame it on shorter attention spans or more people reading on their phones: that’s the way it is on Medium.

That’s right. Forget everything they taught you in 9th-grade English — that every paragraph should have a thesis statement, three examples, and a concluding statement.

Instead, start a new paragraph when you have a point that you wish to emphasize. For means of illustration, I am going to use my own stories. Take a look at this paragraph from my second article on Medium, “Losing Suzy: cat loss and childhood” (May 27, 2023):

Adorable and defenseless as a barely month-old kitten, I had picked her out when my father brought us to a colleague’s home for dinner, an aeronautical engineering professor with twenty-some cats — and one of them had just had a litter. I enjoyed playing with her at the very beginning–the first two months or so. But the 5-year-old me soon became frightened of her as she ambushed me from around the corner of the hallway separating the living room from the bedroom and bathroom. In retrospect and four cats later (not counting all of the cat videos I have watched), I now realize Suzy was probably only playing, but the numerous scratches I got on my arms and legs were painful especially since I wore dresses: strange as it seems, I am not exaggerating when I say that I believed she was out to kill me! My parents were perhaps less scared than annoyed, for they too were ambushed daily. (Years later, we were able to laugh at how she had jumped onto the kitchen counter devouring the defrosted burgers we were supposed to have for dinner.) But when Suzy leapt into the air in the wee hours of the morning, pulling down all the Chinese lanterns in the living room of our apartment, that was the last straw for Mom. We can’t afford to keep her, she said.

WHOA–that was 16 lines here! I’m sure there were readers who looked at that and thought UGH and ran, costing me a few reads. But what if I formatted it like the following?

Adorable and defenseless as a barely month-old kitten, I had picked her out when my father brought us to a colleague’s home for dinner, an aeronautical engineering professor with twenty-some cats — and one of them had just had a litter. I enjoyed playing with her at the very beginning–the first two months or so.

But the 5-year-old me soon became frightened of her as she ambushed me from around the corner of the hallway separating the living room from the bedroom and bathroom.

In retrospect and four cats later (not counting all of the cat videos I have watched), I now realize Suzy was probably only playing, but the numerous scratches I got on my arms and legs were painful especially since I wore dresses: strange as it seems, I am not exaggerating when I say that I believed she was out to kill me!

My parents were perhaps less scared than annoyed, for they too were ambushed daily. (Years later, we were able to laugh at how she had jumped onto the kitchen counter devouring the defrosted burgers we were supposed to have for dinner.) But when Suzy leapt into the air in the wee hours of the morning, pulling down all the Chinese lanterns in the living room of our apartment, that was the last straw for Mom. We can’t afford to keep her, she said.

See how the reformatted version with shorter paragraphs feels much lighter even though the sentences are exactly the same? (I will address sentence length in another article.)

In fact, as you will see in that very article, many of the paragraphs are extremely long:

But within a month, my style had undergone a marked change. Notice the difference between these two stories on Thomas Paine for a general audience. The first one was written on July 14, 2023 and the second a month later on August 19. See how the paragraphs are considerably shorter?

In future articles, I want to focus on crafting persuasive essays, personal reflections, sentence construction, and word choice.

Stay tuned!

©️Frances A. Chiu, January 13, 2024. All rights reserved.