Yes, Medium publication editors are an asset to platform and the value they add is overlooked. I'm not sure how it would work or how quality could be maintained, but I feel Medium editors are the mules of the platform. It's a thankless job.

This story by Akis Apostolopoulos raises so many great points that I wanted to share it. I hope all Medium writers to read it.

I realize there is going to…

Haiku

Farmers rise early
racing the sun’s soaring heat
to reap their bounties.

Notes from writer:

We walked early this morning, to beat the oppressive heat that’s sitting heavily atop of South Korea. For the past several days, the peninsula has been on a heat alert. It is difficult to walk; I can’t imagine working in a large garden.

Despite the temperatures, the industrious farmers who live near me— many of whom must be in their late 70s — are up before the dawn toiling in the soil. They wear big, protective hats and long sleeves to block the sun.

I am loath to…

As I See It

After I read Walter Rhein’s piece, “How to Not Irritate Editors,” I gave it a standing ovation.

It’s well written, thoughtful, and offers excellent advice to writers who genuinely want to improve their drafts. As a Medium editor and a freelance editor myself, I nodded in agreement, while highlighting his best sentences.

But one of his sentences gave me pause. Walter wrote: “Speaking as an editor, I can assure you that I will always pick a properly edited article that is mediocre, over a poorly edited work of genius. It’s not even close.”

That’s interesting. …

Medium now offers a cool new feature for writers called the List.

Now that we have this option, can we please stop pinning every story we write to the top?

As a reader and writer on the platform, I think it’s time we all agree to release our grip on pinning stories and start using the new List feature.

Here’s why: Nothing annoys me more than opening my homepage, seeing that a writer I follow has published something new, then having to scroll past their pinned stories to find the new one.

Some writers have as many as five or…

The hardest part of publishing is finding the errors in your own draft before it goes live.

Everybody knows all writers need editors. From novices to pros; from native speakers to second-language speakers; from editors who also write — we all would be much better writers if we had a second set of fresh eyes at our disposal to review our work to find our writing mistakes. Unfortunately, most of us fly solo when we write and review our own work.

Reading a story and finding writing mistakes is jarring, like hitting speed bumps in the road. Mistakes disrupt the…

I write this as an editor of a publication and a writer who seeks to get published in Medium publications: What writers often fail to understand is that there are usually only 1 -3 editors per publication, and publications get submissions all day, every day. There is always a queue of new submissions for editors to review. Most editors have lives of their own outside of Medium, lives where we work for a living -- real, paying jobs; where we take care of our families; spend free time at hobbies; spend time in our communities, etc. Also, many publication editors…