Style Guide & Tips

Cohort 1 — RBK Tunisia

As a potential contributor to RBK Students’ Blogs, this style guide aims to help you use the best patterns of blogging on Medium. As a student, you need to make sure your blog falls under the topic given to you by your Class Coordinator and follows these guidelines included in this guide to make your content relevant and professional.

Titles/Headlines

These are a super important part of your piece; you should put some serious thought into them.

• Please make sure your blog has a title.
• It’s best to follow AP style for title capitalization. This means all major words are capitalized, while minor words are lowercase. Title Case Converter is a helpful tool, if you’re not sure.
• Don’t use clickbait such as: “You Won’t Believe How Easy It Is to Fix These Errors!”
• Avoid having questions in your titles (“10 Reasons Why You Should Learn JavaScript in 2021” instead of “Why Should You Learn JavaScript in 2021”).
• Don’t add a question mark at the end of your title if it is a question (“How to Make Your Website Run Faster”).

Header Images

A suitable high-resolution image is a great way to welcome your readers to your blog. It will look better in Medium’s news feeds and it will be more prominent on Facebook and Twitter news feeds when people share your piece, making people more likely to click on it.

• Make sure that your piece has a header image with proper credit. Sites like Pexel offer tons of great imagery. Plus, they make it easier to cite your source.
• Avoid using offensive or shocking imagery such as people screaming, clowns, or other images that people might not want to look at.
• Try to be as creative as possible with your cover photo and don’t go for something obvious. For example, if your piece is about React Hooks, avoid header images with fishing hooks or of the logo itself. Or if your blog is about time management, try to not use an image of a clock.

Code Formatting, Gists, and Links

• Variable names, file paths, URLs, directory names, class names, and values should be code formatted like this. They should not be bolded or italicized unless they are also code formatted and you’re doing it for emphasis. You can code format something by highlighting it and hitting the ` key on your keyboard.
• If your code is longer than 10 lines, please put it in a GitHub gist with the proper file format. Create a public gist, paste that URL into your Medium piece and hit enter and this should render it in your piece and include syntax highlighting if your gist is named with the correct file extension (.css, .js, .swift, etc.).
• Please link to languages, frameworks, and libraries if they are not well-known. You should link to something if it isn’t well-known so the reader can quickly learn more about it.
• You only need to link that to that resource once. If you reference a React library by name five times in a piece, you only need to link to the first reference.

Plagiarism

Copying and pasting someone else’s work and using it as your own, without citing them as the source, is plagiarism and it is not tolerated.

You may quote an organization, the copy from a GitHub repo, the words of someone who inspires you, etc., but always attribute these words to the people who originally said them.

Links & Embedded Media

• If a link is vital to a story, put it on its own line and press enter. This will create a preview card, like this:

COOL HUNTING®

• Try your best to not paste URLS directly like this: https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/npm/lodash, instead, the link should be given a text lodash packages in CDN
• You can also embed Tweets, YouTube videos, and other media by pasting their URLs into Medium on a new line, then pressing enter.

Text Formatting

• You can use bold or italic — never both — to place emphasis on a few words. Don’t use bold or italic on links — the line underneath them already provides enough emphasis.

Don’t use drop caps (like the one in the beginning of this sentence). They might add some style in old books, but they look silly on the web.

• Only use one exclamation point, after exclamations like: Wow! What an amazing feature!
• Do not put spaces before punctuation, like this : example. Spaces only go after your comma, period, colon, etc.

Some Extra Tips

• Keep your tense consistent throughout your blog. If you’re talking about something that occurred in past, use past tense.
• Thanking the reader for reading your piece in your conclusion is a nice sign-off, but is obviously not mandatory. They spent part of their day with you and your work, it’s always a nice way to say goodbye.
• Medium allows you to add up to five tags to your story. Use them. People follow specific topics on Medium. Some popular ones are #tech, #life-lessons, and #startup. Tags also make it easier for people to stumble upon your story in search results.
• Avoid using calls to action (such as, Follow me on Twitter!) this is considered self-promotional and will be edited out.

We look forward to your submissions!