What’s Markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents. Created by John Gruber in 2004, Markdown is now one of the world’s most popular markup languages.

Note: Using Markdown doesn't mean that you can't also use HTML. You can add HTML tags to any Markdown file. Markdown is in no way intended to be a replacement for HMTL. The synatx is also much less extensive.

Enclosed my most used formatting

Headings

Code:

```
# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3
```

Result:

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Highlighting of phrases:

Code:

*italic* and **bold**

Result:
italic and bold

Text colours:

Code:

Here text is highlighted in <span style="color:red">red.</span>.

Result:
Here text is highlighted in red..

Source: