The Writing Garden
The Nifty Feature Medium Writers Can Use to Edit Their Work Like a Boss
Go on now, try it out for yourself!
“Oh, you’re a boss!”
My husband might say this to me if he finds I do something exceptionally well — don’t know if it’s a Trini thing or a New York thing. He’s a blender mix of both, but I do love the saying.
We can all be a boss when it comes to both writing and editing, but it does take some work.
And as a wise man once said:
“To write is human, to edit is divine” — Stephen King, On Writing
Many Medium writers may already know about this feature and use it to their advantage, yet I’m surprised by how many still don’t.
I’m talking about the draft listening function.
It’s quite simple to use, and it’s also quite simple to tell who isn’t using it, like when I and my fellow editors receive draft submissions full of the most obvious kinds of typos. Silly peeps!
A typo or two (or three) can often easily be overlooked, it’s true — we are all mere human, after all — and such errors are easy enough for us to fix, but a story full of such errors can be crazy annoying.
Aside from being able to catch and fix simple errors though, you can perform many other cool editing tricks by having your story read aloud back to you, including:
- Evaluating sentence structure
- Rethinking the organization of a story
- The overall tone of your writing
Warning! Listening to your own writing being read back to you can be a true trip at first if you aren’t used to it. However, I dare you to challenge yourself here. Try, as much as possible anyway, to step outside yourself and evaluate your own stories as someone who has never read them before. Valuable insights into your own writing can often be obtained.
Takes practice and I’m not sure if it’s 100% achievable but it can help a lot when it comes to improving the quality of your stories and overall writing. You might find that you are pleasantly surprised by certain aspects of your writing, and you also might be horrified by others.
That’s ok. It’s all part of the process. I myself am both constantly pleasantly surprised and completely horrified about my own writing at times. Ha ha, it’s just that darned human thing again!
How it Works
It’s pretty simple to do on a desktop computer:
- On any draft story, click on the three dots (…) up at the top.
- Choose ‘Share draft link’.
- Be sure to open this link in a new tab, which may work a bit differently depending on your browser. For me, I can right-click on the link and choose ‘Go to… (the link)’. Or, if your browser works differently, you can also copy and paste the highlighted URL into a new tab of your browser. Either way, make sure the draft link opens in a new tab.
- So, now you should have your editable story open in one tab and your draft link open in another.
- On the draft link, click on the listen button to hear your story being read back to you. When you come upon something you feel needs to be edited, simply hit pause, go back to your editable story and make the edits.
Pretty simple, eh?
What about if you use your phone or tablet to write and edit though, smartie pants?
If you are adept at using Medium in the browser of your phone, it should work much the same as above. My fellow editor Anne Bonfert was kind enough to give it a test before I published this story.
However, here is another method I discovered that you can try out using the Medium app plus your browser.
- In the app, tap on your photo in the bottom right corner. This will bring up your list of stories.
- Next, tap on the small down arrow where it says ‘public’ and choose ‘drafts’.
- On the draft story you want to edit, tap on the three dots off to the far right and then tap ‘view’.
- At the top of this page, tap the share button, which is the one that looks like a small box with the up arrow.
- Here you can do one of a couple of different things. Either tap the ‘copy link’ button and then go to an open page in your browser and paste in the link and go. Or, you can tap ‘share via’ and then choose your browser to open the link. I have noticed on my iPhone that in using this last method the link will open in Safari but not in Chrome. Whatever! Luckily there seems to be more than one way, and we aren’t going to be talking about skinning any cats here, as this is a cat friendly story! 🐈😻
- So, now you should have a page open in your browser that clearly contains the listen link. You can listen in the browser and then go back to the page open in the app in order to make edits.
That’s pretty much it. Give it a go and see if it works for you.
I often listen to drafts of my stories, even in the early stages when I have little written, just to see how something sounds and if I’m headed in the right direction.
Sometimes, I will write two or three intros for my story and then listen to which one sounds better.
Other times I will decide that I should organize my paragraphs different or reword a sentence so that it sounds better.
Give this a try and let me know how it goes.
And if you’ve already been using this feature to edit your work, let me know how that’s been working for you as well.
Happy writing everyone!
