Why I love Markdown #

Let the writing do the talking

No matter how often you do it, starting the process of writing is agonising. It is slow and full of false starts. Not because we don't know what to write, but because we could write anything. The blank page is infinite, without footholds or signposts.

So we start doodling in the margins.

page with an ornate THE written on it, and nothing else

Death to .docx #

Children are most susceptible to this trap. Students will often be thrown into the blazing white .docx quadrangle before they have even the most basic understanding of computers, drafting, or the formalities of writing. They can be overwhelmed by the profundity of formatting options - the colours, the WordArt, the clipart (oh God, the clipart) - so much so that the words themselves seem less important.

some classic examples of Noughties wordart What a thing of beauty.

And who can blame them? Formatting is fun! Unlike crafting prose, the feedback loop is instantaneous, the results immediately visible. Click this button and look: it's bigger! There's no equivalent for writing, no "click here to increase pathos by 20%." At least, not yet. There isn't a primary teacher in the world who hasn't let their students work on computers for a lesson, only for the hour to produce nothing more than 30 documents with a single, brightly coloured heading of My StOrY.

Man cannot live by Format->Font alone #

Formatting is lower-order thought. It may be creative, but it is not generative. It is not the valuable part.

Visit any consultancy or agency producing reports and decks for a living and I will guarantee that billable rates scale inversely to the amount of time an individual personally spends fiddling with column layouts and transparency effects. Those at the very top can live in a workflow of bluntly worded emails and WhatsApp voicenotes.

Why? Because content is the valuable part, not the colour.

Alan Partridge speaking into his dictaphone You may not like it, but this is what peak creativity looks like.

If that's the case, when we really need to write, why use tools that distract us from the core purpose?

Writing requires discipline. And you can only have your pudding once you've written (?) your meat. In releasing students into the all-you-can-format buffet of Word.exe, we let them gorge on sweet treats of colouring and shuffling, whilst skipping the chewy fibre of actual writing.

More with less #

So how should we begin? How do we put down the first word and start the flow of writing?

Like any chemical reaction, tweaking the environment helps: something to lower the activation energy and get the words bonding into sentences. Increase the temperature, the pressure, and the collisions increase. The same with writing.

It's well-documented how the limiting of options paradoxically enhances creativity. Tell a child to write a story about anything they want, any way they want, and it will be slow going. Tell them to describe their morning without any words that use the letter A, and suddenly it is a challenge they can throw themselves into.

Don't bash the '#' #

By setting boundaries on the creative process, we can channel ourselves more easily into actually producing something. This is why it's one of the great crimes of digitised education that we've attached so much importance to fully-featured word processors. They're designed for desktop publishing, not for writing. If raw prose is the proxy for thought, all those shiny formatting buttons are nothing but distractions at best, and strains on the cognitive load at worst.

This is where Markdown comes in. Basic formatting exists, certainly, but it is there to structure your writing and thinking. The point-size, underline style, colour of your heading? Don't worry about that. Just know your heading is there and focus on the words underneath it.

That hour in the computer lab spent fiddling with titles? Now it just looks like this:

1# My Story
2Once upon a time there was...

That's it.

The restriction of your options to a limited few (headings, italics, bold, etc) keeps Formatting where it belongs - down at the bottom of Bloom's pyramid - while you scale the heady heights and actually write.

So try it. Embrace the blank page. Trust the words, not the fonts.