What is Markdown?

To preface, this guide is written for absolute beginners, for people whos technical literacy consists of chromebooks, smartphones, Instagram etc.. For a more technical guide, refer to Markdown syntax.

Markdown is a markup language, a system which governs the structure and formatting of a written document. It is a syntax, a set of rules that say “when you write this, you will actually get THIS”. The purpose of Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. You can kind of think as baby’s first coding language, the next step after Scratch. You write an input of sentences, you type certain symbols along with the sentences, and the output looks different than what you inputted based on the symbols you used. It’s like google docs, where you modify the plain text in a file as you go, except you write the changes (bold, italics, heading etc.) IN the text instead of pressing buttons on the screen. This is where both its advantages and disadvantages lie compared to document apps like google docs and word. Because all the changes are stored in the text, it is extremely easy to export and import any writing, its easy to understand why text looks the way it does in the output, and it teaches basic coding principles. However, unlike google docs, Markdown does not treat you like a child. You are expected to learn the system and remember it instead of just looking at buttons. Markdown is essentially an easier, less powerful version of HTML, which is the industry standard markup language. HTML actually has a powerful set of commands for doing different things in a document, but requires more effort to learn than Markdown, which relies on being extremely intuitive and simple.

When am I using Markdown?

Whenever you are publishing writing on Third Culture. This includes when you write a post on your blog, when you make or edit a web page, and when you post a comment.

How do I use Markdown?

This section will go through the most common modifications you’ll want for your text.

To create a blue link, surround the text you want to be the link you click on with square brackets []. Then, immediately afterwards, surround the URL you want the link to redirect to with normal parentheses (). If you want to simply create a clickable url, surround the url with < and >.

Example:

[the link](the url)
< https://thirdculture.top/guides/Guide_To_Markdown >

To create an unordered list, simply put a *, -, or + behind the text you want to present in a list. To create an ordered list, put numbers with periods (1.) behind the text you want to present in a list.

Example:

1. one
2. two
3. three

To emphasize text, surround it with * or _. One for italics, two for bold. If you want to actually use asterisks or underscore, put a backslash \ before them.

Example:

*italics*
**bold**

To create headings, put # before the text based on the heading size you want. The more hashtags, the smaller the heading.

Example:

# one
## two
### three

Again, for more ways to use Markdown, and to better understand why these things work the way they do, refer to Markdown syntax.

To post a comment you need to login first.