WRITING

Is A Lot Of Medium Just Bad Writing?

A growing suspicion that there is simply a whole lotta bad writing going on

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

I had begun hearing about this new platform called Medium as a place that actual writers were using, a few months back. I knew that former President Barack Obama had published a piece or two, and that The Atlantic was testing the waters as a secondary means of distribution, but it felt like just another blogging platform that maybe we didn’t need. Nevertheless, I like to try new things, if for no other reason than I like to know what the kids are up to, and also to slow my inevitable decline into irrelevant obscurity. So I figured I would check it out.

When formatted properly, there is a simplicity and elegance to the platform that you don’t find elsewhere, so as a veteran writer and designer, I immediately understood the attraction. Good writing is more enjoyable when presented well, there can be no doubt about that. Clean, uncluttered pages of easy to read type, with a few stock photos thrown in to raise the level of sophistication while costing the writer nothing, was a pretty good model for a writer’s platform. What was not to like?

But as I began to explore the platform, and learn the difference between topics and publications, submissions and paywalls, kickers…