Tips for Formatting Your Title and Headers
This is your readers’ first impression of your story — make it look great
When a reader lands on your story or sees it in their feed, the title and subtitle are the first thing they see. We recommend formatting your title and subtitle properly in order to provide a better experience for your readers. Before they start your story, they will have an idea of what they’re about to read. Think of it as a brief introduction of your story for your readers. While it isn’t the focus of this tutorial, note that you can also customize the preview title and subtitle of your stories.
Some advice on writing a great headline (aka title) can be found here:
How to Write a Compelling Headline That Isn’t Clickbait
Your headline is your first impression. Here’s how to write a great one.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll reference the title, subtitle, and subheaders in this (now-out-of-date) story, “How Medium’s Curation, Distribution and Paywall Systems Work for Writers.” This is an example of a good title. It is clear and tells you what the story is about. The subtitle, “A detailed look at how Medium works, and some of the recent changes we’ve made,” tells the reader a bit more about the story.
Formatting the title and subtitle
When you open the editor, you’ll see a space to include the title and subtitle.
Click on “Title” and write the title. It will look like this:
Below that, type the subtitle over the “Tell your story” section under the title.
Notice the formatting looks like body text. In order to format the subtitle properly, highlight the text and select the small “T” icon from the formatting menu.
The subtitle is now properly formatted. Notice how it reads better than when it was unformatted and looked like body text.
You may find that after writing your title and subtitle, they default to being unformatted. This doesn’t look great, and it is hard to tell that these two lines are the title and subtitle.
In order to format the title properly, move the text to the top of the story so the title is the first line. Then select the text and click the big “T” icon.
