The Tiny Markdown Course

"A minute to learn, a lifetime to master." So said the Othello game box, a version of Reversi I played growing up. It's a simple enough game, but you'll master the nuances only with practice.

So it feels with Markdown, the plain text formatting syntax. It won't take a lifetime to master, but it will take more of a commitment than, say, learning the standard keyboard shortcuts to add bold and italics text. And so the inertia of what you're already used to keeps you from learning the new. And yet, you need to learn it. It's used everywhere—especially in developer-focused tools—and will help you write better, more consistently formatted text for the web, without switching context away from your writing.

All you need to do is to practice Markdown a few minutes each day for a week. That 25 or so minutes of commitment will speed up your writing for the rest of your life.

That's what the Tiny Markdown Course will do for you.

Signup for the free course, and for the next five days you'll get one email a day. It'll teach you a bit of Markdown—with best practices to remember the types of Markdown that'll also work on Textile-powered apps like Google Docs comments and Slack. And at the end of the email, there's a tiny bit of homework, a prompt or two to get you practicing the Markdown you've learned.

Do that for a week, and you'll never have to check a Markdown cheat sheet again. You'll be formatting GitHub issues and 1Password login details and Things tasks and Roam Research or Obsidian notes—all apps that require Markdown for formatting—without a second thought.

Ready to start? Here's the tiny free course you need to master Markdown.

Happy writing!