Your content doesn’t Matter if you don’t have this in your Article
Part 3 in “ How to be a Writer Series”
This is the third article in How to be a writer series.
Imagine……
You’re a great writer with an extraordinary worldview, and you wanted to share your knowledge.
You open a medium account and start writing.
You wrote a thousand-word article in three paragraphs and posted it.
A month has passed, and when you check, you see no views but cricket’s shit all over your post.
Why did that happen?
This happened because, as an average writer, you overlooked one important thing.
The Packaging.
After the first step of making up the mind and the second step of writing, it is the third step of editing and formating that decides a person who clicks on your article reads it till the end or not.
Like it or not, it’s the packaging that attracts the audience instead of the content.
Paragraph and spacing
Our daily readers are busy people with no attention span who scroll their phones thinking about their ex’s ex.
So when they see a big block of text of ten sentences, their minds make them pee their pants and scroll away faster than flash.
Therefore, an article must contain small paragraphs and enough space between the lines.
Reading is talking. We don’t speak in the same pitch from start to end without pauses. We take pauses, change the pitch with our feelings, and we stress words to show importance.
We read in the same way, and we write according to that.
Each paragraph has an Idea. It can be small or big.
Break them into a single or a bunch of three sentences to convey the idea in the best way.
You can write a single line to stress it more(Like I did here).
This article is written in this way.
Subheadings
Twenty-four hours is less for people. Even the useless people have lack of time. So, to tackle this, you have to make your article skimmable.
Your reader should get an idea about your article by reading only the subheadings.
This way, they can know if your article is for them and worth their time.
Subheadings are the points of your arguments.
Subheading makes the reading easy and reduces the mental load of a reader.
Bold and Italics
Use bold to highlight the specific words and sentences you want your readers to notice.
Italics are used for your thoughts or the dialogue of a conversation.
Also, It refers to the excerpts or quotations of famous people you are mentioning.
Bullets
People expect clarity and conciseness these days.
Please express your idea in bullets.
- It helps people understand things easily.
- You can directly talk about the point without beating around the bush.
- It makes things look nice and clean.
- It holds attention more than those long sentences.
Other simple things in Medium
You can add images according to your titles. You can use emojis to show your emotions. But not more than 3 emojis per article. They are a lot more distracting than helpful.
You can add links and
Use quotation marks for the sentences that show changes in you or the characters you were talking about.
Overall, these are the ways you can make your article chewable for your readers.
If not, you may be the Marcus Aurelius of the digital era, but no one will give an F about your articles except good ol’ crickets.
This is the end of the “How to be a Writer Series”.
As for me, I am a budding writer.
If you like this article, please give it a clap and consider sharing it with your friends. And don’t forget to comment on the parts you agreed or disagreed with.
I would be delighted to make exciting series like these in the future.
Connect with me at: https://twitter.com/BobbaTheGunman
See you in the next article, until then, Bye.
