WRITING TIPS | NEW WRITERS WELCOME
3 Creative Ways To Customize Your Medium Stories
Transforming Them Into Eye Candy! 🍬
When we write an article, there is a lot to consider such as correct spelling and grammar, readability, and complete source citations.
Furthermore, we have other options with which we can make our articles pretty!
And let’s face it, who doesn’t want their article to stand out a tiny bit from other stories?
Today, I’d like to share 3 ways that help creatively add your own personal touch to a text.
1. How To Underline Words and Phrases
When you select a part of your text, you will be presented with formatting options.
And then you will probably notice that next to bold and italics, the underline option is missing.
But there is a very simple trick! 💡
If you link a word or a part of a sentence, it will be visually displayed like an underlined text.
You can simply enter random letters, Medium will generate a link, which is then invalid.
Or you can link something relevant from the internet.
For my part, I usually go to image search in Google and then simply link to a quote or a meme.
No matter how you do it in the end — you visually get the desired result!
By the way, this also works in combination with other formattings including quotes. Only for headlines, unfortunately, you have to do without this trick.
2. How To Spice Up Your Story With Emojis
Emojis, along with images, is a wonderful way to breathe some life into a text.
However, you should be careful not to overdo it, otherwise, it can make a chaotic and thus unprofessional impression.
Personally, I like to use emojis to replace bullet points.
For example, a pro and con list might look like this:
💕 Pizza is delicious!
💔 Pizza has 10,000 kcal!! ← not really
💕 Pizza makes us happy.
💕 Pizza brings people together!
But also neutral lists can be displayed a little prettier this way. Here you can simply choose the emoji according to the theme:
🤎 I love Pizza
🤎 I love Iced Coffee
🤎 I love Chocolate
🤎 I love Cookies
Another variant would be a kind of checklist:
✔️ My husband loves Pizza
✔️ My son loves Pizza
✔️ My mom loves Pizza
❌ My boss does not love Pizza
As you can see, there are almost no limits to your imagination!
You can find a large selection of Unicode emojis for example on → Emojipedia.
3. How To Beautify Your Text With Custom Text Dividers
The text divider implemented in Medium is well known.
The 3 small dots divide the story into manageable parts and create so-called white space, which makes reading more pleasant.
But of course, you can individualize this, too!
With Canvas, Gimp, or other graphic tools you can create your very own text divider!
Whether these are curved lines, complex patterns or the divider consists only of an icon, is up to you.
Also, the color can be chosen freely.
Since these are images, you should only use images that you have either created yourself or that do not necessarily require a source.
Especially in the latter case, it is highly recommended to add at least at the end of your story a citation of your text dividers.
Please note that especially ILLUMINATION does not accept stories where the citation is not directly below the picture — which of course would not look so nice on text dividers.
So if you plan to publish your story via ILLUMINATION, it’s best to skip this third tip.
Finally, one more hint at this point: If you decide to use a custom text divider, make sure that the background is transparent and not white.
Even if the background of your stories is white on the PC, it can also be displayed in black on the mobile app.
In this case, custom text dividers with white background give a rather unprofessional impression.
And that’s all, I hope you have a wonderful week! 🤍
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