Formatting
By the end of this lesson you'll be able to make text bold , italic , and struck through , drop in inline code and syntax-highlighted code blocks, and shape a document with blockquotes and dividers — the everyday toolkit behind every README, GitHub comment, and docs page.
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Part of the free Markdown course at LearnCodingFast — hands-on lessons with examples you run in your browser, plus practice exercises and a quick quiz.
Think of Markdown markers like a highlighter set . You don't open a menu to change a font — you wrap the words you care about in a symbol, the way you'd run a highlighter over a sentence. One asterisk on each side is a thin highlight (italic); two is a bold one; two tildes draw a line through it. The key habit: a marker has to hug both ends of the text, like opening and closing a bracket. Forget the closing marker and the renderer just shows the symbol as plain text.
1. Bold, Italic & Bold+Italic
Wrap text in one asterisk or underscore for italic , two for bold , and three for both at once. The marker must touch the text on both sides — **bold** , never ** bold ** .
Prefer asterisks ( * ) over underscores ( _ ). Underscores inside words — like my_file_name — can accidentally trigger italics in some renderers. Asterisks never do.
2. Strikethrough & Inline Code
Two tildes on each side ( ~~like this~~ ) draw a line through text — handy for "old price, new price". A single backtick on each side makes inline code : a monospace snippet that won't be treated as Markdown, so symbols inside it stay literal.
Inside code, stars stay literal: a ** b means a to the power b.
Need a literal backtick inside inline code? Wrap with double backticks: .
3. Fenced Code Blocks (with highlighting)
For more than a word or two of code, use a fence : three backticks on a line of their own, then your code, then three backticks to close. Write the language name right after the opening fence — RENDERED RESULT
Common language tags: js , python , html , css , bash , json , sql , ts . GitHub, GitLab, and most docs tools recognise dozens more.
4. Blockquotes (and nesting)
Start a line with > to make a blockquote — usually rendered as an indented bar, great for callouts, quotes, or "Note:" boxes. Add a second >> to nest a quote inside a quote. Keep the > on every line you want included.
5. Horizontal Rules & Line Breaks
Three or more --- (or *** or ___ ) on a line by themselves draw a horizontal rule — a full-width divider. Line breaks are sneakier: a single newline is usually ignored . To force a hard break within a paragraph, end the line with two spaces or a backslash ( \ ); leave a fully blank line to start a new paragraph.
The ·· above marks two invisible trailing spaces. Because trailing spaces are easy to miss in review, many people prefer the visible backslash for hard breaks.
~~text~~ isn't in the original spec, but it's part of GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) , which GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, and most modern tools use — so in practice it works almost everywhere.
A single newline doesn't break a line in Markdown. End the first line with two spaces or a backslash for a hard break, or leave a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs.
No blanks this time — just a brief and a blank canvas (with an outline to keep you on track). Write the Markdown yourself, run it, then paste the output into a previewer and check it against the expected result in the comments.