Welcome back to Teaching Tuesday!
The Lesson:
I wanted to take the opportunity to go over formatting stories for Reddit. A lot of us are used to writing with a word processor and use those formatting tools as a habit, but that leads us to grave mistakes when posting on Reddit.
Old Reddit uses markdown as its formatting language. This means that you wouldn't make your actual text italic, but instead use marks to indicate that the text shown should be italic. The formatting tips are linked under the text box for submissions. (And we'll go over them a little later in this post)
New Reddit doesn't require you to learn or use markdown, so that's something to consider when deciding whether to stick with the Reddit you know or use the redesign.
Basic Reddit Formatting
Newlines are one of the most common errors among WP authors. We are used to just tapping enter to continue to the next neat little paragraph. Alas, markdown doesn't recognize it and you end up with a wall of text. This is a simple fix, just tap enter one more time before starting the next section and you're golden.
Line breaks are useful for poetry. To enter a line break that's smaller than newlines for a paragraph, simply space four times before hitting enter to go to the next line.
Paragraph indentation is another common mistake we encounter as story-writers on Reddit. When we try to manually insert spaces to mimic tabbing on a word processor, Reddit thinks we are trying to share lines of code. These lines do not wrap, so a reader would have to scroll right until the end of that "indented" paragraph. Lucky for us, this is also an easy fix! Some of us have learned to just do away with indentation for works we share on Reddit, but for those that insist, you can get the effect of a tab by typing instead of spaces before your paragraph. Just keep in mind that Reddit does have a character limit on posts.
Headers are a nice, easy way to make titles or sections of titles stand out. To identify text as a header, you simply add # before the text. You can add up to 6 of them for different sized headers. Here are all of ours in action, to use them, add as many # as the number of the header before your text.
Header1
Header2
Header3
Header4
Header5
Header6
Stylized text is a cool way to distinguish parts of your writing in your stories. These are offered in the way of buttons on your favorite word processor, but here, you've gotta use markdown.
- italics
*italics*
- bold
**bold**
strikethrough ~~strikethrough~~- superscript
^superscript
Emdash is a neat tool that we don't get to see a lot of. To use it in your stories — type —.
Links are a nice way to share the rest of your work at the end of your story. (You can also request your flair be set to your personal subreddit via modmail.) To share a link, [Put the text you want shown as your link in square brackets,](https://www.reddit.com/r/vanitysub) followed by your link in parenthesis.
Separators (or horizontal lines, or horizontal rule) are useful for indicating one section of text is over and a new one is beginning. Similar to a newline, this will help organize your story and make it look more aesthetically pleasing to your readers. Remember to use an extra space before and after your separator, or you'll underline the line above to make it look like a header!
--- on its own line will create:
Reddit Redesign Formatting
The redesign allows you to use the brand-new text editor instead of dealing with markdown. You should be familiar with the buttons offered, as they're the same as most word processors. Go forth and write, friends!
You absolutely can still use markdown if you like the redesign. Just click the link on the bottom to switch to markdown. For more about using the redesign on WritingPrompts, check out MajorParadox's Did You Know? post.
You will not be able to use the WP specific formatting on the redesign.
WritingPrompts Specific Formatting
Dropcaps is a favorite among our writers and it's a pretty simple trick! To use it, enter ######[](#dropcap) before tapping enter twice and beginning your story. This will only affect the very first letter of your post. You can see it in action on our wiki.
Smallcaps is another nifty trick you can see on the wiki that is rather easy to use. Similar to sharing a link, you'll put the text you want affected into square brackets followed by the parenthesis with the marking for smallcaps. [Text to be made tinycaps](#sc)
Reddit Enhancement Suite
Get this awesome browser add-on to get a live preview of your post as you write it. RES also has many other useful features to use on Reddit.
The Challenge:
Try out these techniques in your next story. You're welcome to reply to this post with a story practicing formatting, or to practice on other prompts.
Here's some prompts to get you started.
Want to add to the discussion?
Post a comment!