The first time I started a piece for Medium, I thought it was something that had to be accepted for publication.
It took me three days to make sure I followed the style guide ( I used APA, and made sure I brushed up on the most current manual), employed SEO techniques, and Googled every grammar rule I wasn’t positive I knew perfectly (semicolons and commas and titles, oh my!) before I submitted. I was careful to make everything perfect.
I did this in a Word document and copied and pasted the whole thing into Medium and then tried to use Medium’s tools ( italics and bold and quotation marks and headings) and I highly recommend against that route because it doesn’t work and you’ll end up retyping the whole thing.
When the piece was structurally sound, I bit the bullet. And I HATED the end result.
Because that is not how I write. I write conversationally and I use made up words like spazgasm and I love run-on sentences and sentence fragments. Poetic prose with no actual poetry on board.
I realized after some investigation that no one from the grammar police was coming after me and started writing like me. Because the internet has changed writing. And I’m as big a grammar freak as anyone; blatant bad writing in a publication makes my ear hair twingy. Work that was obviously not proofed that someone got paid to write.
But Medium has expanded my horizons and widened my view of what constitutes good writing.
Welcome to the party.
;)
