Coding seems a foreign language to alot of us. Markdonws, HTML and CSS all seem pretty frightening at first, however, when you actually take a minute to look at them they aren’t that scary after all!

To start, Markdowns are simply a way of formating plain text with less hassle of tags. It’s an alternative to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors! For a more technical defintion, they can be described as a *plain text formatting syntax aimed at making writing for the internet easier. *

So, you’re probably thinking, why do I need to use markdowns? but… markdowns are easy to learn and fast to use. All you need to remember is to use: **. For example, *word* will make it bold, typing **word** or _word_ will italicize the word, links are written like this [anchor text](http://www.URL.com), and lists are written simply as hitting enter and add any of these three characters at the start of each line: -, *, +.

Still not convinced? Here are some other reasons as to why Markdowns are here to stay!

• Markdown converts easily to HDML- this spares you the hassle of opening and closing all those tags (yes, all the tags!)
• Markdown is useable and openable by modern programs- the days of programs like Microsoft Word having 8 diffrent filetypes are history!

• You dont have to switch ediors to write prose- with the introduction of Markdown, writing blogs and emails within UltraEdit are now an easy way to proceed.

  So, the overriding theme here is that, when broken down, Markedown is actually pretty simple- and almost certainly should be your new best friend!