The (Rough) Style Guide to Medium
Helping content creators at the University of Manchester Library produce their Medium stories in a more consistent style.
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This guide has been superseded by the TLS Style Guide for Medium on the SLS Medium account.
This guide contains a number of standard approaches that will make your content easier to read and make the embedded elements more accessible.
- Story title and subtitle
- Using headers
- Breaking up your text
- Building a clickable menu
- Resources — embedded content, emoji, etc
6. Readability
TEMPLATES
HOW TOS
1. Story title and subtitle
Title
The title is the first line of every Medium story. You’ll see the word ‘Title’ in the left hand margin when the cursor is in this section (see screenshot above).
Choose your title wisely as this will be used to create the web address (URL) for your story. Once you’ve published your story changing the title won’t change the web address.
Subtitle
If you add text below the title and format it as the smaller of the two header styles it’s converted into a subtitle (see screenshot below).
The title and subtitle will be shown in Medium search results and any publications to which the story is added.
2. Using headers
Headers take the form of larger, bolder text and are used to show the start of sections and distinct items within sections.
There are two sizes of header you can use.
Large header
This sentence is an example of a large header.
When you’re breaking up your story into sections the large header should be used at the start of each section. You can see examples of this in the story you’re reading now. This section — 2. Using headers — has a title using the large header formatting.
Small header
The small header is used to label distinct items in a section. The two items you’re reading now — Large header and Small header — each start with a small header to make them stand out.
3. Breaking up your text
In the words of Neil Sedaka, breaking up is hard to do. But if you want your Medium story to be as easy as possible to read then you’ll have to forego those page-long paragraphs and break up the text.
There are a number of ways to do this.
Adding more line breaks
Adding line breaks (that’s when you hit the Enter/Return key) creates a natural pause between one sentence or paragraph and the next. In Medium pressing the Return key moves the cursor down two lines leaving a clear space in between.
The sentence you’re reading now is an example of where a line break has helped to break up the text.
Adding quotes
Another way to break up the text is by adding text using the quotation styles.
This is the first Medium quotation style. By default it uses an italic font that you’ll need to remove for accessibility purposes (see ‘italics’ below)
Quotations can be used for actual quotes (see use of ‘quotation marks’ below) or for highlighting important sentences you want to make stand out — like this one!
This is the second Medium quote style. Pick the style you prefer and use the same one throughout your story.
Whereas newspapers will often lift quotes from an article and place them in a quote box or under an image, in Medium there’s no need to duplicate a quote. Instead it should be part of the natural flow of the text.
Adding images
They say a picture paints a thousand words. We wouldn’t go that far but when adapting the content of text-heavy Word documents or PDFs the addition of images is a great way to make the online reading experience easier and more pleasant on the eye.
Unlike the gratuitous cat photo above your photos, illustrations and graphics should be appropriate and relate to the contents of the story. Decorative images with abstract patterns can be used but try not to add too many.
For visually-impaired readers and those using text reading software all images should have a caption explaining what the image depicts.
You should also add relevant ‘Alt text’ to all images to make the description accessible to screen reading software.
You should only use:-
- Creative Commons images
- Images to which we (the Library) own the copyright
- Images you’ve created yourself and are happy to share
Please check the details of the licence and where required credit the source, state the license and link back to the source.
The Digital Society story Support for your coursework has more information about screenshots and images, where to find them, and how to use them appropriately.
Adding section dividers
See those three dots in the centre of the page below this paragraph? That’s a section break. Use it to separate one distinct section from the next.
4. Speech marks, inverted commas, italics and bold
In the words of Mary Poppins (if she’d been a Medium writer)…
“Whiskers on kittens, speech marks, inverted commas, italics and bold text are a few of my favourite things”.
However, just because they’re available to use doesn’t mean you should always use them, everywhere, for everything, all the time.
Whiskers on kittens
These are nice to have, particularly if you own a kitten, but aren’t relevant in the context of using Medium. Let’s move on… (Sorry, Mary!)
Speech marks
You should only use speech marks if you’re including a direct quote from another source, such as when Obi-Wan Kenobi said to Luke Skywalker “Use the force, Luke”.
See the ‘Adding quotes’ section above for use of quotation styles.
Inverted commas
These are used when you want to highlight a specific word or term, like when you’re telling someone to click the ‘submit’ button. Please don’t use speech marks for this.
Italics
In short, don’t use italics.
In a bit more detail, don’t use italics because they’re harder for people with certain sight impairments to read. I’ve not even used italics in this example!
Bold
Bold text is useful to make specific words or phrases stand out. This can be used with or without inverted commas as appropriate.
4. Build a clickable menu
5. Resources — embedded content, emoji, etc
Keyboard shortcuts
Ctrl-? brings up lists of keyboard shortcuts for use when writing and editing on Medium.
TK
Typing the letters TK anywhere in your story adds an orange TK in the left hand margin. This is a way of marking a particular place you’d like to come back to. Maybe it’s waiting for a link, or the spelling needs to be checked. Whatever the reason, if you try to publish a story that contains any TKs you’ll receive a warning message first.
Adding code
Press Ctrl-Alt-6 to turn text into a ‘code’ box. This is handy if your story contains actual code, but can also be used to highlight other pieces of text.😁 Emoji
Emoji are graphical symbols that can be added to text. We can use these to denote embedded elements such 💬 Contribute (comment stream) and ✅ Poll.
All currently available emoji can be found on emojipedia.org along with images to show what each one looks like on different platforms (Apple, Google, WhatsApp, etc).
✍ Padlet
Read the following prompt then add your contribution to the Padlet below. If you’re not logged on to Padlet your comments are anonymous.
✍ Write a response
Scroll to the bottom of this Medium story to write a response. Make sure you are logged in with the Medium account you are using for the Digital Society course.
💬 Contribute
Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
If you can’t access the comment box, please write a response to this post instead.
> tourmaline-court — DEV embeddable content for ESOL, MLE, CBT etc. (Glitch)
✅ Poll
Read the following prompt then vote below. All responses are anonymous.
Poll: How well prepared do you feel for a career in an age of automation? Options: Yes / No / Unsure. If you can’t access the poll, please add a response to this post.
💭 Reflect
Read the following prompt then add your thoughts in the box below. Nobody else can see what you type. The text is saved automatically on this device and browser only.
6. Readability
To make your Medium posts as easy to use as possible, we try to make sure a few elements are always included. You can see some good examples of these things in any of the previous Digital Society topics.
Tone, register and plain English
We often use a fairly informal tone in posts, with a non-academic register, and standard contractions (you are -> you’re, and so on). Sometimes you might want something more formal, but either way, choose the formality of your post and stick to it! We also try to write in plain English, which means avoiding unnecessarily complex or confusing language, including figurative or idiomatic phrases. This helps to make your post easy to understand, especially for neuro-diverse readers, or those who speak English as an additional language.
Introductions
Your intro should set clear expectations for what the post will cover, just as a session has learning objectives. Let them know what’s in this post (as opposed to any previous or later posts), links to any workshops it might support or complement, and how it’ll help them. Place your intro below any top image, and above the menu.
Conclusions and summaries
Especially if your posts’s a long one, a conclusion or summary might be really helpful for your reader. Place this before the ‘Further support’ section.
