Making words bold or italicized is a common (and important) part of adding emphasis to your writing. There is no paragraph tag like you’d find in HTML. When you want to make a new paragraph, just leave a blank line in between the line of the last paragraph and the start of the new one. Ready to jump in and get started using Markdown? Here are the basic characters you’ll need to know. If you want to add some formatting, all you have to do is include a special punctuation character at the beginning of the line or around the text you want to change. To write paragraphs, you simply type the text you want. Learning these tags isn’t impossible, but it can take a while, especially if you want to do a lot of different formatting or do something outside of the basics. In other types of coding, like HTML, special command words, tags, or other syntax is used to tell the computer what to do or how to display something. Below, I’ll make it easy for you to learn Markdown in its simplest form. Markdown is designed to be quick, easy, and accessible to the average person, which makes it perfect for small business owners, bloggers, and others who want to be able to create engaging webpages but don’t have the time to learn how to code or the money to spend on hiring a professional. While there are some special symbols you do have to learn about, they’re nothing close to the complexity of tags used in standard HTML or the line formatting you have to understand in order to be able to write in CSS.

Everything is written in plain text that’s very easy to read, write, and understand. Markdown is a way of creating content for the web without learning any programming language.

Writing in Markdown will help you communicate more effectively by adding various styling elements to your content, without the need to learn traditional HTML or CSS. As a small business owner, content creator, marketer, or community manager, knowing how to write Markdown is a helpful skill to have.

Start formatting your emails in Nutshell to deliver the most effective message to your customers. Did you know? Nutshell now supports basic Markdown in emails.

Macdown shell