Streamlining Your Substack: From Pronouns to Platform Design

The importance of pronouns, tags, groups, and sections + my new endeavor

Listen to the podcast here ↑

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Today:

• Writing: Pay Attention to Pronouns

• Substack Tech:

  • Tags are not hashtags (yes, I’m posting this again because it’s so important)

  • Groups vs. Sections in 4.3 minutes (ditto—people need this)

• Plus! A sneak peek at my new writing school: Writers at Work Studio

• And why the Notes Boost Challenge is so worth it

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• Resonant Writing is about crafting posts that engage, connect, and stay with your readers—for anyone who writes, not just “writers.”

Writing: Pay Attention to Pronouns

I could offer a whole class on pronouns—the unsung heroes of the English language. We practically ignore them, instead indulging in adverbs and obsessing over nouns and verbs. Pronouns are little and unassuming but do a lot of work and get little credit.

A pronoun refers to a person, place, or thing.

Yup, the operative word here is refers to.

Notice how often in your writing you have a wayward it’s or this or that or these or those with no referent. Nine times out of nine, it’s a red flag that what you’re writing won’t resonate, i.e., will fall flat. Why? Because you lose your reader, just for a moment, while the reader digs back through your sentences to figure out what the heck you’re referring to, but a moment is long enough.

Today, we’re going to focus on a particular possessive pronoun, it, and the demonstrative pronouns this/that/those/these.

When we write, we assume readers are in our heads and know exactly what we mean. They aren’t. They don’t.

When we write it’s true or that’s important or these aren’t better or those don’t matter, the referent (what it, that, these, those refer to) is often far away—two, three or five sentences back or too many points have been made to know which point the pronoun is referring to. To us, these pronouns need no explanation but the reader isn’t us.

This is important.

See? What’s important? The fact that the referent is often far away or too many points are made or that these pronouns need no explanation or that the reader isn’t us?

We can use these pronouns without referents, of course, but paying attention to these five pronouns can make your reader feel like you’re taking very good care of them.

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Not-dry-at-all-dry tutorials and quick-to-implement tech tips

- Tags are not hashtags

It’s perfectly natural to think tags are hashtags, but they’re not. Nope. They’re not.

• Tags are not hashtags and aren’t for discoverability.

• Tags are used to design your homepage into Groups. (For more on Groups, see below.)

So what to do with all those tags that aren’t hashtags that you’ve been plugging in?

• To get rid of them, you don’t have to go through every post.

• Delete them in your dashboard settings.

• Settings > Sections > Danger Zone > Delete section.

• It’s scary, but your posts will just go into your main Substack section.

- Groups, not sections

Sections continue to be misused and create mayhem on Substacks near and far.

• Groups are used to design your homepage and order your Substack.

• Sections create entirely separate email lists/publications within your Substack.

• In 90 percent of cases, you want groups, not sections.¹

  • Use sections to create an entirely separate Substack within your Substack.

  • Use groups to design and organize your Substack.

  • Does it matter? Yes, sections cause all sorts of complications and aren’t meant to be used to organize or design your Substack.

If you’ve created a lot of sections, you can fix it by simply deleting the sections. It’s scary, but all that will happen is those posts will no longer be sectioned off and will exist in your main Substack.

Sections, Groups, and Tags Explained in 4.3 minutes:

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Sneak Peek:

The Substack Writers at Work Studio

I’m starting a writing program:

The Writers at Work Studio. Master your craft. Build your career.

Classes will be two-day and one-day intensives, plus I’ll likely be offering the Substack in 5 Weeks Accelerated Course in some capacity.

The Studio is about writing as a profession but a profession that we all can inhabit in different ways, particularly how people in different careers who love writing can use it to bolster their careers.

Writers at Work Studio 2025 Intensives:

• Using Substack to Jumpstart Your Writing Career

• Funny on Paper Writing Intensive

• Writing That Resonates: A Voice Intensive

• It’s Not Personal Writing Intensive

• Storytelling Intensive

• Publicity for Writers Intensive

The Studio is completely separate from Substack Writers at Work.

More details to come1

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Why the Notes Boost Challenge is well worth your while

Paid subscribers who are participating, let me share this:

Yup, I got 23,000 new followers on my author Substack in one day from Notes. The growth is absurd. Let’s do it.

1. Yes, many of the new people telling you how Substack works and what you should do are getting them wrong.