More Reminders To PW Writers
If I state this often enough, maybe someone will pay attention
Hello again, dear Writers.
I am seeing a lot of unnecessary issues with some of your stories and I wish to make some clarifications.
KICKERS
If you are going to use a Kicker, please read this excellent article by Casey Botticello who explains what Kickers are and what they are not:
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-kicker-f203a2cb2f75
And just as a reminder — Never Put A Link In Your Kicker. When people click on your story to read it, they will go to the link you added instead of your story.
If you are not sure how to use a Kicker, just don’t use one. It is not necessary, it just helps kick people to your work if they are searching Medium or Google for an article. If you want to use a Kicker, for the love… PLEASE read Casey’s tutorial.
TAGS
I’ve written an entire tutorial on using Tags. Apparently some of you have not read it. For reiteration:
Promptly Written writers ❗MUST❗ use one of the following tags:
- POETRY for poetry
- FICTION for fiction
- ESSAY for personal essays, creative non-fiction, or personal rants
- ARTICLES (with an S) for articles or other nonfiction (book reviews, movie reviews, etc.)
Get into the habit of making one of those four the very first tag you use.
If work is not properly tagged, it does not fall into landing pages for each of those categories. If your work does not land into one of those categories, it will become lost on PW after it falls off of the Latest Stories section at the end of our Home Page.
For other tags that are useful for your pieces, see this tutorial
PROPER CITATION
Any time you use someone else’s work (Medium Writers’ work, Images, YT Videos, Quotes, Book Excerpts, Lyrics, etc. ) You MUST link back to the original source. Otherwise, you are violating Copyright! Too many writers here are not properly citing other peoples’ material and it needs to end. Editors should NOT have to keep reminding you to do the proper thing when it comes to other peoples’ work.
Highlight where you want to add the link and then use the chain icon on the editing tools to include a link. Easy peasy!
If it sounds like I am frustrated in this post, it is because I am. All of this information can be found either here on PW in a tutorial or on Medium by searching on Help or for articles related to these topics. If you do not want to follow these basic standards, then may I suggest PW is not the right place for your work.
Thank you for reading (you did read all of this, right?)
Ravyne Hawke, EIC
