Best Practices for Writing On Medium

A non-exhaustive list of tips from our editors

Photo by Susan Yin

Medium is an open platform and a publisher. Anyone can write a piece on Medium and, as long as it’s not in violation of our rules, have the potential to find an audience. We celebrate diverse voices and believe that good stories can come from anywhere.

We also care about quality. We want you to put your best work on Medium, and we regularly feature stories we think are great. To help you understand what we mean when we say “quality,” we’ve written up these guidelines. They are based on what we know works best for readers — which means they should work well for you, too.

• Write a clear headline. Readers have a split second to decide if they want to read your piece. Put a good, descriptive title and subtitle on your story. (Standard “headline” styling is title case for the headline and sentence case for the subtitle. This isn’t mandatory, but it’s ideal.)
• Your story should contain original insight, ideas or perspectives. Don’t just aggregate the work of others, and don’t plagiarize.
• Clean it up. We all make mistakes, but do look out for typos and janky formatting. Put care into your work.
• Avoid CTAs. Readers tell us that they find repeated calls to action — to sign up for a newsletter, to clap — annoying. Consider eliminating CTAs altogether.
• One of the things our readers like best about Medium is that it’s an ad-free zone.
• Please don’t publish stories with the primary purpose of selling a product or a service. Readers can see through content marketing.
• There are a lot of places on the Internet for clickbait. Medium doesn’t want to be one of them.
• Put a nice image on your story — just make sure you’re not violating someone else’s copyright.
• Finally, please don’t peddle pseudoscience or bad health advice. Life’s already too short to give people bad health advice.

In short, do your best work. People like to read things that are just good.