16 tricks to turn your Medium drafts into beautiful looking stories

A mini-guide to formatting your writing

Alessandro Butler
The Startup
Published in
7 min readMay 21, 2019

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Formatting tricks will never cover up poor writing. But poor formatting can ruin the reading experience no matter how good the writing is.

We’ve brought together 16 formatting tips to up your Medium game.

Formatting the above-the-fold section: titles, subtitles, hero image.

1. Couple your “title” with a “subtitle”

In the most cluttered marketplace in history, grabbing the attention of your readers begins even before they land on your story — think of platforms where people discover your post in the first place.

On social media newsfeeds or search engine result pages, your stories will appear only as a tiny preview: title, subtitle, and a thumbnail image.

And your subtitle, together with your main title, will heavily impact your story’s CTRs within those few minutes where people decide whether to click through or not.

IMPORTANT: You won’t initially see the subtitle formatting option when you start typing your draft on Medium’s editor. To find the subtitle format, you need to 1) type your main title 2) hit enter to move onto typing the next line 3) when done, select the entire line and click on the small “T” among the formatting options. Watch the gif tutorial below to see it in action.

2. Use a “kicker” to get more creative

Medium editor offers another handy formatting option to further beautify the above-the-fold part of your story: a kicker.

As the subtitle, finding the kicker option isn’t immediate. You need to 1) type your main title and subtitle 2) bring the cursor right before the first letter of the main title 3) hit enter to move both to the next line 4)…

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