Writing and Formatting on Medium: A Comprehensive Collection of Best Tips

Dos and don’ts for writers as per Medium and Soul Magazine’s guidelines (plus bonus tips)

Image designed by the author using Canva Pro

It remains to be settled whether the beginning is tougher than the intermediate part of the process, however, the beginning is rough, in its own way.

If one starts on Medium, soon enough they experience the beauty of Medium: built-in SEO and audience. We don't need to worry about keyword selection, density, and the like.

As long as people can relate to your experience, that’s okay — because they WILL read you.

And guess what?

No matter our nationalities and ethnicities, we all relate (at the core) in more ways than we imagine.

However, for the reader to perceive your message and to stay on your page, you’d need to format it as per Medium policies. It’s a basic human need: the comfort of familiarity.

In other words: a consistent formatting style, when followed, enhances the probability of improved concentration on the message you took such a time to write.

This comprehensive guide is a collection of the best up-to-date tips to facilitate consistency in style and content we share here on Medium. It includes:

• A Comprehensive Collection on Formatting Tips
• An Ultimate Tips Collection for Researched Pieces
• Regulations for Using AI in the Writing Process
• Best (yet less common) Writing Refinement Tools

A Comprehensive Collection on Formatting Tips:

1. Basic Formatting:

Medium already provides a clear-cut guide on how to bold, italicize, and use headers, subheaders, kickers, block and pull quotes, mentions, emojis, superscripts, TK reminders, mentions, and story counts for the app and web.

Thus, whether you enjoy finalizing your piece in the comfort of your bed with just your mobile or on a spacious desktop screen, Medium has got you covered. And I, myself, hadn’t known them all when I began on Medium — let’s execute more of them in our writing to ensure uniformity in all our pieces.

Reference for Title and Headers:

You may refer to this link and the ones embedded below for a step-by-step guide.

Tips for Formatting Your Title and Headers

Reference for kicker:

Medium Tips

2. Medium Guidelines for Title & Subtitle:

Now, as per Medium guidelines, your story must have a title and a subtitle.

• Your title should be in the title case. You may refer to this tool (Capitalize My Title) for formatting your title. There is no period at the end of the title.
• The subtitle must be in sentence case. There is also no period at the end of the subtitle.

3. Best Tips for Sentence and Paragraph Length:

Web readers have an attention span of 8 seconds. Thus, to engage them in reading, keep changing the sentence and paragraph length, so the reader can continue reading. Bonus tip: an overview of the final draft on the Mobile app gives a very fine estimate of how interesting your every paragraph’s length choice is.

Here’s a guide for you on how to organize both sentences and paragraphs:

The Complete Guide to Formatting Your Stories on Medium

4. Best Tips for Quotation Formatting:

As per Medium rules, citing someone else in your work, or quoting your one-liners is different in essence and thus quotation formatting.

Let’s take a look at the easy-to-follow guide below:

The Definitive Guide to Medium’s Quotation Feature

5. Headline Analysis:

To draw in an audience and make the most of your readership, consider utilizing tools such, as CoSchedule, Sharethrough, Capitalize My Title, and similar ones. Most of them are free.

6. Image Formatting Guidelines:

• Medium asks you to credit both the site and the creator of the image (you’re using) — even when the site permits its visitors to use it without credit as well.
• An Alt (alternative) text is super helpful for impaired individuals (and also for SEO).
• A personalized caption piques the reader’s attention. Thus, your image draws readers in rather than distracting them with proper caption and alt-text.

Here’s a link to a step-by-step guide on it:

Writing Alt-Text for Your Stories

An Ultimate Tips Collection for Researched Pieces:

As per the rule of thumb, anything which is not common knowledge must be cited. Thus, if you’re writing a piece on the “Philosophical Interpretation of Justice”, many readers, like myself, wouldn’t be aware of the nook and cranny of the philosophical world.

Quite naturally, we’d like to refer to more sources to understand it deeply — and fact-check if the information is intriguing. So, that’s from where the rule to cite finds a way.

However, let’s picture you read something about philosophical doctrine from Google, it continues to be with you. Now, you write a personalized piece on it. We have tons of Google searches daily, and it’s quite natural to lose the source link — even then, you need to add a relevant link.

Here, at Soul Magazine and Medium in general, hyperlinking is enough. Referencing is a bonus.

If you’re writing an extensively researched piece, here’s what you should look for in the source before relying on it, and thus citing it:

1. The authentic publishing house (Government organizations, United forums, Journals, Newspapers and Magazines, and, of course, Books)
2. The unbiased approach
3. Pertinence of evidence to your point
4. The overall goal of writing and the audience (this helps spot opinion pieces from researched ones)
5. The relevancy of time

(Please don’t get overwhelmed with the information above. Your instincts simply know which source to trust and cite.)

Here’s a link for it as well:

A Quick Guide to Citing Properly on Medium

Regulations for Using AI in the Writing Process:

Hint: AI is for Research.

We live in the age of AI — and if you’re just starting, AI-generated writing feels the easiest way — especially on a creative block day. Undoubtedly, in many ways:

“It’s no longer survival of the fittest. It’s survival of the fastest.” — Nikki Barua

However, don’t let this seduce you into removing yourself from the equation. Because, from the broader view, content creation is mostly about quality — and AI has still a long way to go before offering as much quality and nuance as the human mind can.

Let’s see where’s the difference.

Let’s say you’d like to write an article on “How Women’s Day is celebrated across different continents?” You put the title in Japser and press CTRL (or command) J. And, in seconds, you’d get as much long content as you want.

Now, it looks just wow. Headings from H1 to H6. Keyword density maintained. Transition words used. Bucket brigades piquing interest. Everything is in place.

But can you label it as quality content?

The only big issue with AI, from the surface, is plagiarism — the swiftest way to get the Google penalty. However, there are other troubles as well.

For example: search for the same keyword in Google and analyze the webpages ranking on top. You’d find the natural flow missing in AI-generated content. It feels like it’s coming from a mechanical heart. And, do you believe readers, in this age of quantity, would read through a bot-generated write-up?

The world is seeking quality passionately — because quantity has proven to be fallible.

Thus, at Soul Magazine, we encourage you to use AI as a research tool rather than a writing one. Use AI to strategize the content, outline, get feedback, etc., not to do the writing for you.

The submissions we reject mostly because of the overwhelming AI percentage are mostly researched pieces. Instead of rephrasing sentences to reduce AI content, why we can’t just write our own way — with AI just as a source?

Here’s another way to use it constructively:

1. Use Bing AI (Copilot) to help you find reference links on your topic of choice (say: How Women’s Day is celebrated across different continents.)
2. Since Copilot has real-time information (much more up-to-date than the free version of ChatGPT — that’s why I recommended the former), you’ll get clickable references plus an overall summary — thus, you know now what the overall information is all about (mental conceptualization ✔️)
3. Now skim through sources, ask for more sources if you need them, and if you find some paragraphs relating to your overall idea, instead of extensively reading it you use a summarizing tool like Quillbot, Semrush, Tomedes Free Text Summarizer. (The last one is my favorite.) You get the general idea — now, challenge your mind to fact-check the summary via intensive reading.
4. Now that you have located relevant information — use storytelling to knit it all in one fabric. And, you provided your audience with: information + connection.
5. This saves time you spend on fact-checking and content direction. But remember: you still have to write it. AI just gave you direction, your choice of words and style plus the non-robotic heart has the power to add colors to the dullest piece of information.

However, please use free tools like ZeroGPT for AI checking and Duplichecker for plagiarism. This helps you find which sentences, and paragraphs, need special attention while editing and rewriting.

Best Writing Refinement Tools:

One part of our job as editors is to support you in your journey as a writer. Thus, let me introduce you to a few tools that can help you enhance your writing: (I’m assuming you’re already familiar with Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, ProWritingAid, etc.)

1. Copywriting Examples

You witnessed a moving event and decided to include it in an article or story. Now you’re grappling with the challenge of doing justice to this subject. Specifically, how do you craft a headline that effectively conveys the depth of your message without baiting the reader?

Copywriting Examples is a website having almost all the attention-grabbing phrases (used as slogans by prominent organizations). You can get an idea of how to add spice to your headline and, thus, improve readership.

2. Power Thesaurus Free Extension

As a writer, sometimes all we care about is finding the right word. Power Thesaurus Extension can help you with that.

If you’re reading a sentence but can’t think of the right word, just select the word you need a match for and a bunch of similar words will pop up— when this extension is installed.

This way you can quickly find the word that fits naturally. Without any hassle.

3. Paper Rater

There are moments when we find ourselves grappling with self-doubt as a writer. This is when receiving feedback changes the atmosphere. However, as I'm sure you'll agree, Feedback mostly comes from published or sent-out content. What about while you’re in the process? Paper Rater facilitates the journey.

Here’s how the paper rater works

You choose the type of paper you are submitting whether it’s a narrative, research paper, blog post, article, etc. Nobody knows yourself personally — thus, here at Paper Rater, you let it know your academic/information level. After filling in the necessary details, Paper Rater provides you feedback on:

• Writing Style Score
• Bad Words/Phrases Score (based on quality, quantity, and appropriateness)
• Sentence Score
• Transitional Phrases Score and the like.

Final Thoughts:

Writing has never been easier without a multitude of free and customizable tools. However, we, as writers, are responsible as always for instilling quality in our content — because the goal is to put forth something timeless.

This collection of tips on Soul Magazine’s guidelines, formatting dos and don’ts, and research and writing tips aims to facilitate fellow writer’s journey because, deep down, we all know:

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann

If you’d like to sign up as a writer for Soul Magazine, please refer to this link:

Soul Magazine Sign-UP

Thanks for reading; I wish you a great day :)