ILLUMINATION Editors Are Not Superhuman, But Their Efforts Are Herculean

A Day in the Life of a New ILLUMINATION Editor

Ah, my formidable days sitting in front of our Emerson TV on Saturday mornings. I can still hear the drama in the announcer's voice"… and who disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.

Okay, so the ILLUMINATION editors cannot change the course of mighty rivers nor bend steel in their bare hands, but they still have a vital role in helping Medium's authors sharpen their craft.

Several weeks ago, Dr. Mehmet Yildiz asked me to join ILLUMINATION's team as an editor.

So far, the new assignment has been challenging and fun.

I want to dispel any rumors that ILLUMINATION editors like to change what people write. It's just not true. That's not the job of the editors at ILLUMINATION.

Some Medium Publications may take a heavy hand at editing other people's words, but not here.

Keep in mind that each Medium Publication develops its editorial policies. It would be advantageous to review the editorial policies before joining a pub.

Let me review ILLUMINATION's editorial policies, and I'll throw in a few challenges I've faced so far.

ILLUMINATION subscribes to Medium's editorial guidelines, so let's start there.

Medium frowns on plagiarism in any form. They do not allow duplicate content.

Engaging in threats of violence and incitement, hateful content, harassment, privacy violations, reputation, personal information collection, deceptive conduct, copyright or trademark infringement, SPAM, exploitation of minors, or graphic content is not tolerated.

If you bypassed the step where Medium asked you to review their Rules when joining, now may be a good time.

They do welcome thoughtful and civil discussion, as do ILLUMINATION's publications.

ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications comprises ten channels: ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION'S MIRROR, ILLUMINATION Book Chapters, ILLUMINATION Curated, Technology Hits, Reader's Hope, Illumination Videos and Podcasts, SNYGERY, Illumination Gaming, ILLUMINATION's Blogs, and our newest Publication, Lampshade of Illumination designed to support AI-Generated content.

The editorial team supports and encourages around 20,000 writers who submit hundreds of stories weekly. Over one million stories have reached Medium's audiences through ILLUMINATION's Integrated Publications.

Let me review the editorial tasks I engage in daily.

Authors submit their stories through the Add to Publication feature.

Our job is to ensure all images or photos are correctly attributed to their owner and stories are returned to the writer if the attribution is missing.

Here's an adequately attributed photo.

The photo carries the owner's name and a link to the image’s location; both are required to ensure provenance. Sites such as unsplash.com or pexels.com offer thousands of royalty-free images. If you own the image, add a caption, "Photo courtesy of the author."

I have asked a few authors to attribute their images, and they welcomed my comment.

I did have a fellow, whose name will go unmentioned, that told me he didn't need to attribute photos that belonged to him. He canceled his submission and submitted the story to Medium's general channel. After complaining about our policy, I followed up and noticed he attributed all the images in his post. Perhaps he was having a bad day.

I also remember a blogger friend who used what he thought was a royalty-free photo. Shortly after publishing the post on his blog, he received a cease and desist email from a legal entity at Getty Images with an invoice for $900 attached.

Please attribute all images and photos to your story; it makes our editorial process smoother and faster.

As editors, we are tasked with reviewing the story's content. We don't fact-check or editorialize what's written, and we check for plagiarism and run the story through an AI-Generated app such as ZeroGPT. Illumination has ZERO tolerance for plagiarism and harmful content.

AI-Generated content should only be submitted to Lampshade of Illumination, or you can submit your stories through Medium's general channel. Here's Medium's stand on AI-Generated content.

If the story content seems rough, I run the post through Grammarly. Think of this cloud-based app as a high school English teacher looking over your shoulder. The app checks the spelling, grammar, and punctuation. It also suggests replacements.

If the story has a high number of alerts, I make a suggestion to the writer that they look into downloading a free copy of the software.

I did run across a writer whose story had 172 alerts. I suggested he might want to consider using Grammarly. Unfortunately, he snapped back and said if I was not going to publish his story as is, he was leaving ILLUMINATION, which he did. Perhaps he was not having a good day as well.

Actions like that are unfortunate. I was only trying to help him become a better writer.

I have found the editorial team at ILLUMINATION experienced, helpful, professional, and fun to work with. My writing and editing skills are only getting sharper.

Every new writer must review the critical points in the onboarding pack, which has several useful references:

Here is the checklist which helped many new writers:

Here’s our photo handling policy as well.

Keep the submissions coming; we’d love to hear from you.