Laying It On The Line
Tip Of The Day — Day 11 — Layout
This is part of a series of daily tips for writers which is published to share ideas and suggestions on our craft. Everyone will have different advice on how to write, so the tip below is just a personal selection which I hope you will find useful, and do share any of your own in the comments
It is worth planning the layout of your article before launching in, to have at least a rough idea of the desired finished appearance of your article.
One reservation with this approach is that over-thinking can impede the flow of an article: sometimes it is best just to launch in, and tidy it up afterwards. This is probably an individual preference depending on how you write, but an outline structure is often a good idea.
In terms of structure, at the very least, most articles have an introduction, the main body of the article, and finish with a summary or conclusion. Sometimes articles use framing, where the first sentence or so of an article is referred back to at the very end, which is quite a useful technique.
There are exceptions to this if you are trying to achieve something different, and the recent tendency of AI-generated articles to always finish with a bland neat conclusion, may mean that human writers decide to vary their structure to be more original.
Formatting
Even the most amazing article can become hard to read if it is just endless paragraphs of text. So make the most of the tools available including the Medium toolbar, to break up the text.
When you highlight text in your article in Medium the formatting bar pops up, with basic options like bold, italic, using dropped capitals for the first sentence of your article, or making a link. However it is limited, for example, by not including a vital spell-checker, so it is best to write your articles off the platform using MS Word or similar, and Grammarly is an invaluable tool to help spot typos and grammatical errors. The free version of Grammarly is easy to download and use.
Quotations
Quotations can also help break up the text and can be in two forms: either marked down the side if you select the quotation symbol from the toolbar by clicking once, or as a pull quote, if you click the symbol twice. One advantage of the pull quote format is that it breaks up the text even more.
Tricks of the trade
To use a dropped capital at the start of a section, highlight the first sentence, and select the “T” symbol second from the right on the toolbar.
Another formatting trick is that if you hold down the Ctrl key and hit return it inserts a dotted rule in your article which can be used to separate blocks of text.
A very useful guide to articles on Medium is provided by Casey Botticello, packed with advice from the basic to the advanced, and well worth a read.
Photos and graphics
It is said that a picture tells a thousand words. To make your articles easier to read it is worth adding graphics or photos, and there is a very useful free photo library built into Medium called “Unsplash” — to access it, select the + symbol that appears in the left margin of your article when you hit the return button, and select the second symbol along. The first symbol lets you select your own photos. Another source of copyright-free photos is Wiki Commons.
Footnote
At the end of your article, you may want to include a call to action (CTA), and include a list of further reading, references, or a bibiography.
I hope you found this article useful, and do share any tips of your own in the comments.
Previous tips:
Day 1- The Notebook
Day 2 — Mind your language — learning new words — https://readmedium.com/mind-your-language-516fa91eb859
Day 3 –Quotations
Day 4 — Dictionary and thesaurus —
Day 5 — Location —
Day 6 — Planning —
Day 7 — Reverse engineering success —
Day 8 — Choosing your subject —
Day 9 — Do your own research —
Day 10 — Niches for Riches —