If you can write an email, you already know 90% of markdown. It's just punctuation that means "make this a heading" or "make this bold" — no menus, no toolbars, and your formatting survives every platform change. This guide covers the entire vocabulary most bloggers ever need.
Headings: the skeleton of your post#
Start a line with # characters followed by a space. More hashes mean smaller headings:
# Biggest — usually reserved for the page title
## Section (this is what you'll use most)
### Sub-section inside a section
Two rules keep posts readable: never skip levels (an H3 shouldn't appear before the first H2), and use one H1 per page — your blog template almost always supplies it from the title field.
Emphasis#
*italic* renders as italic
**bold** renders as bold
***both*** renders as both
Use bold the way you'd raise your voice: sparingly. A paragraph with five bold phrases emphasizes nothing.
Lists#
Hyphens or asterisks make bullets; numbers make ordered lists. Indent two spaces to nest:
- First point
- Second point
- A nested detail
- Another nested detail
1. Step one
2. Step two
One habit worth stealing: keep list items grammatically parallel. Start each with the same kind of word — all nouns, or all verbs — and lists instantly read as professional.
Links and images#
[link text](https://example.com)
The exclamation mark is the only difference between a link and an image. The bracketed text for images is alt text — describe what the picture shows for readers using screen readers.
Quotes and horizontal rules#
A > at the start of a line creates a blockquote, ideal for pulling out a single striking sentence:
Blockquotes signal "someone said this" — use them for quotes and key takeaways, not for regular emphasis.
Three dashes on their own line (---) draw a section divider. Use at most one or two per post; they're full stops, not commas.
Tables#
Tables look intimidating but follow one pattern — a header row, then a line of dashes, then your data:
| Plan | Price | Ads |
| ------- | ----- | --- |
| Free | $0 | Yes |
| Pro | $9 | No |
| Plan | Price | Ads |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Yes |
| Pro | $9 | No |
Alignment doesn't need to be tidy in the source — only the pipes matter.
Code blocks (yes, even for non-programmers)#
Fence text between triple backticks to display it exactly as written, in a monospace box:
```text
Paste anything here — commands, file names,
error messages — and it stays untouched.
```
Writers outside software still need this constantly: keyboard shortcuts, config snippets, URLs that wrap badly when formatted normally.
The 80/20 summary#
Ninety percent of blog formatting comes down to six moves: ## headings, **bold**, - bullets, [links](…), > quotes, and fenced code blocks. Everything else you can look up when it appears.
The real advantage isn't speed, though — it's portability. Markdown files are plain text, so they open in any editor, version-control cleanly in git, and will still be readable in twenty years regardless of which publishing platform survives.
