Yes, You’ve Published Your Story. What Next?

If it is worth your followers' reading time, it’s more worthy of your rereading.

Overloaded. This word best describes the amount of useful and mundane writing advice on Medium.

Right from after your sign-on, you are constantly bombarded with ever more and more useful writing advice.

There is so much of invaluable cool stuff to fill entire libraries' shelves. It is left for you to choose and use them wisely. Because too much of a good thing could be bad for you. Ask those who were fortunate to escape from drowning.

Yes, water is life, but too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time can lead to flooding or drowning.

Your online-writing profession is not immune from this risky fate. Like drug addicts who are unaware of their deadly vices, you can unconsciously sabotage yourself with too much of good writing advice.

How?

By getting addicted to “writing advice p*rn”.

I can hear you querying me, “And if, as you are saying, there is already too much of a good thing, why are you saturating the deluge with one extra drop of your too much of a good thing?”

Don’t get me wrong. If you want your writing to fly and shine, you must polish them with new and old writing tools and advice. Continuously.

I’m not yet done. Hold on for a while longer.

What is the first thing you often resort to after publishing your Medium story?

If you’re like me, your first impulse is to share it on your social media and other blogging platforms.

With a click, you announce to the whole wider world, “Hey Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, (and all the rest of them) here I come with my latest masterpiece.

See it.

Read it.

Clap for it.

And don’t forget to share my latest gem of prose.”

Experienced writers know better.

Despite all the old tested and reliable catalogs of advice in your kit, it seems to me, yet one more is missing out. Or, under-emphasized.

Here it is,

Don’t instantly share your story after publishing.

Rather, do this.

Immediately after publishing your article, open Medium app on your device and read through your recent work. Rereading.

Why did I recommend this counter-intuitive next step? I’ll explain.

This approach will help you catch stubborn and pesky errors that disrespectfully insisted on defying your installed grammar app.

Grammar apps are doing excellent jobs, but if you live in areas of very low network speeds like mine, your writing may escape updated corrections — from those apps.

With this method, you will quickly spot and correct those intolerable, written English mistakes. In one recent article, I repeated a whole numbered list item on the next line, word for word, towards the end of my story. (You won’t see that mistake again and you know why.)

This last experience also proves to me that most of your readers and followers only glide through your stories. They never read them to the end. Don’t be the one hurrying them out of your writing because of avoidable errors.

Some writers object to having their mistakes highlighted in their writings, but I delight, glory and grow through such gentle corrections.

How does it feel, having a family member point out, “hey, you forgot to zip up your pants” or having your wardrobe mishap corrected by an outsider? I sure know my preferred source of correction. I’m sure the same goes for you.

That is what correcting errors you see in your recently published article before they go massively public look like.

Looking back, I am indebted to friends, readers, commenters, clappers, and especially to editors who have helped to mature my writing by correcting my written English mistakes. Some of them have also graciously guided me to grammar tools that I never knew existed. Without them, I wouldn’t have come this far. True.

Here on Medium, every writer is crying his own cries. Without any atom of malice, it is my wish that the hyper-successful Medium top gunners will more readily afford wannabe writers, shoulders to lean on. We will not only see further and know more, we will also write better and grow the pie larger.

This article is not about pursuing unattainable or unrealistic perfection. Your primary goal as a writer is to present your art as best as you can with the helpful tools at your disposal.

Viewing your recently published story on Medium app before sharing it to the wider world will help you detect and fix intolerable errors.

Final Thoughts

• The eraser at the end of your kindergarten school pencil does more than correct our early mistakes. It also reminds you that no one is perfect. And that your errors don’t need to be permanent too.
• One of the best ways to catch and correct your glaring writing mistakes before they go massively worldwide is to reread them via Medium app.
• Reading your articles immediately after publishing them, helps you spot and clean out unacceptable errors before they go massively worldwide.

Now, it’s your turn.

Thank you for reading. Please let me know your impressions.

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