Writing and Editing Basics

Now it’s time for writing & editing basics. There’s a lot to cover here — while each editor (including Notion’s) has its own quirks and feel, writing & editing fluency in a tool comes with experience. We’ll teach you all of the core concepts in this lesson, but we won’t teach you everything yet. We’ll keep coming back to these concepts and features in most lessons of this course, and so we’ll introduce more advanced stuff as we go. This lesson is about the basics!

Block editor

As we already mentioned, the most unique aspect of writing in Notion is its flexible Block-based editor. This makes it stand out from other doc tools, like Word or GDocs. We introduced Blocks a few lessons ago, but now it’s time to dive in a little bit deeper.

Everything that you see on a Notion page is some sort of a block. There are many Block types, ranging from text to complex math equations. As soon as you start typing text into a Notion page, you’re creating a new block — and as long as you keep typing without hitting return, you’ll continue inputting more text into that single block, which, by default will just be a text paragraph.

Whenever you hit return to start a new paragraph, that new paragraph will become a new Block. Each block is, in a way, independent. Of course, Blocks are always part of a page, but we can transform, format, and move Blocks one at a time.

As a quick demo, start typing /h1 on your Notion page — this will create a new block that’s a Heading 1. You type as many letters as you want into that block, but as soon as you hit return, your cursor will move to the block underneath, and it will be a regular text paragraph.

We can either create new blocks with their type already specified or transform a regular text block into other types.

To try out the writing experience in Notion, you can try:

Writing a simple paragraph of text
Once you’re done writing your paragraph, hit return
Then, use “/h2” to create a Heading 2 block
Now, the fun part; hover over your Heading 2 block, you’ll see two buttons appear to the left of its first letter — a + icon and six dots. Try clicking and dragging the six dots to the top of the page and see what happens. Your Heading block should move above your Paragraph block.

Ta-da! Now you’ve experienced the magic of block-based editors. It’s much easer to rearrange and transform content this way, instead of constantly having to select, cut, copy, and paste, like in a Word doc. Notion docs, due to their Block-based nature, are more flexible and intelligent.

Here is a list of all the basic text-based blocks in Notion:

Text
Headings 1-3
Bulleted list
Numbered list
To-do list (text entries with a little checkbox next to them. Great for quick checklists!)
Toggle list (more about toggles later!)
Callout (great for emphasis, more later)
Quote

Watch our above video for a full demo of the writing experience!

Text formatting

Outside of Blocks, which allow you to do some text formatting by specifying the type of a specific block, Notion also has traditional text formatting within text blocks. Think of your usual stuff — bold, italics, ~~strikethrough~~, color, etc. You can select any amount of text in a block, and a little formatting menu will pop up. It contains your usual options (from left to right):

Add a comment (covered later in the course)
Suggest edits
Block type (click to transform the current block into a different type)
Bold, Italics, Underline and Strikethrough
Mark as code snippet — this is great for anyone working with code
Mark as equation (covered later)
Add link (external, as in to a website, or internal, to a Notion page)
Text color (you can change both the text color or background color).

Text formatting in Notion works pretty much the same as in your traditional writing tools. You’ll notice that there are no font or sizing options – while Notion has a great editing experience, it is a bit more limited than your traditional Document tools.

So how can I style my pages?

Page Styling

Notion’s styling options are simpler than Word or Docs. We don’t have many font options to choose, and we can’t mix and match different fonts in a single doc. We also have one (technically, two) font sizes. Page styling (not formatting) is per page — we can change those settings for a single page, all at once. No mixing, and no changing the defaults.

You can access the page styling options by clicking on the three dots in the top right corner of a Notion page. This will bring out a helpful menu with a bunch of helpful page options. At the top we have:

Fonts: Default, Serif, and Mono. This setting will change the font on the entire page.
Small text: this will change the font to a smaller size across the whole page.
Full width: this will decrease the margins on the page.

We’d definitely love to see some more styling options in Notion, but it’s important that Notion is not meant to be a very powerful text editor — its power comes in all of its other features. Text editing is important, but Notion like to keep it minimalistic on purpose, to focus on other features that make it stand out from the crowd.

Word count

In the same top-right, three-dot menu, you’ll see your word count at the bottom. This is the only place in Notion that you can check the word count for a Notion page. There isn’t much more to it. It’s important to remember that it will not count the words in your sub pages from a page.

Colors

Now, to briefly mention colors. There is a default set of colors that can’t be changed. They vary slightly across dark mode and light mode, but there is no way to modify the specific color hues. Minimalism 🙂

You can either add color to some selected text, or change the color of an entire text block, or its background. To change the colors for an entire block, just click on the six dots that appear on the left of any block when you hover.

This is it for writing and editing basics! Now, it’s time to talk about Markdown shortcuts.