Ten Formatting Tips to Make Your Articles Shine
Simple guidance for editors and writers who want to produce well-formatted, professional pieces
The simplest reason to format your articles consistently is to avoid giving readers a reason to doubt you. If you don’t follow basic conventions in formatting, why should we trust your thinking or your advice?
A professionally-formatted article tells us you took care to learn and follow the rules. That won’t make every reader agree with you, but it inclines them in your favor.
Improve your chances of broad readership
Medium will distribute well-crafted and properly formatted stories more widely than others. See the Medium Rules for details on this, including a long list of things that will prevent your story from being eligible for a Boost.
What follows are ten basic tips to format your story well. I use these for my publications and in my stories. You’ll encounter many other tips, but if you start here you will start well.
Structure your article like this
1. Start with a title, formatted T1 (the big T). You format text by first highlighting it and then selecting an option in the popup box that appears.
2. Include a descriptive subtitle, formatted T2 (the small T). Between the title and subtitle, a reader should have a good sense of what your article is about.
3. Insert a feature image, on which you have attributed the source, see below.
4. You may break up the body of your article into sections, as appropriate. Consider using descriptive subtitles for longer sections. Subtitles are generally formatted T2. (Less common: you may use T1 for major sections and T2 for subsections within those major sections.)
Capitalization of titles and subtitles
5. Capitalize the words in your title using Title Case format, in which all major words are capitalized, while minor words are in lowercase. Double-check that you have done this properly using the free checker at Title Case Converter.
6. Capitalize the first word of your subtitles (i.e., use Sentence case, which you can also check at the Title Case Converter).
Image requirements
7. Your article must have at least one feature image. Often one is all you need. For longer articles, consider adding additional images as a way to break up the text.
8. All images shall have a caption that indicates the source. Your caption can also be descriptive or funny. Just make sure you indicate the source.
9. Add an alt-text description to all images. Click on the picture, then the words “Alt text” that appear in the pop-up box. Write a description of the image for the visually impaired. This is both a best practice and will help ensure the broadest distribution of your article on Medium.
Check your grammar
10. Use an automated tool to check your grammar, such as Grammarly. You can install a plug-in on most browsers that checks grammar as you type.
- I recommend this no matter your experience and comfort with English grammar. It is hard to catch everything unaided.
Note, no tool is perfect and yours will recommend changes that are incorrect in the context of your sentence. But it will more often help you catch embarrassing mistakes.
Good luck in making your writing shine.
Be well.
PS — Bonus item #11: Check the submission guidelines if you submit your draft to a publication. Even if you have used that publication before, this can save you from making simple mistakes. Correct tagging and inserting links are two common problem areas.
If you submit stories to Career Paths or Pragmatic Wisdom, following these rules will make the review process a breeze.
PPS — If this all seems like too much that will only impede your artistic sense, this article is for you: an ode to punctuation capitalization and more
