The core markdown syntax

In this guide, you will learn the small set of markdown symbols that cover almost everything you will ever need to write.

Headings

Headings are how you label the sections of a document. In markdown, you make one by starting a line with a hash symbol. More hashes mean a smaller, more nested heading.

# Main title

## A section

### A smaller subsection

One hash is the biggest heading, usually the title of the whole piece. Two hashes mark the main sections, and three mark the parts within a section. You will rarely need to go deeper than that.

Bold and italics

To emphasise a word, wrap it in symbols on both sides. Two asterisks make text bold, and a single asterisk makes it italic.

This is a **very important** point.

This word is *slightly* emphasised.

If you want both at once, you can use three asterisks, though you will not reach for that often:

This is ***really*** worth remembering.

Lists

There are two kinds of list, and both are easy. For a bulleted list, start each line with a dash and a space:

- Milk
- Bread
- Coffee

For a numbered list, start each line with a number, a full stop, and a space:

1. Preheat the oven
2. Mix the ingredients
3. Bake for 20 minutes

Here is a small piece of magic worth knowing. You can write 1. at the start of every line and the tool will number them correctly for you, so you never have to renumber a list after adding a step in the middle.

Links

A link has two parts: the words you want to show, and the web address they point to. In markdown you put the visible words in square brackets and the address in round brackets, right next to each other.

Read more on the [AI for Beginners homepage](https://ai-for-beginners.net).

The reader sees “AI for Beginners homepage” as a clickable link, and the address stays tucked away in the brackets, out of the way.

Code and code blocks

Sometimes you want a word or symbol to appear exactly as typed, without markdown trying to format it. Wrap it in single backticks to keep it as it is:

Press the `Enter` key to send your message.

For something longer, like several lines you want kept exactly as written, use three backticks on their own line before and after the block:

```
Line one, kept exactly as typed
Line two, also untouched
```

That is the same fenced style we use throughout these guides to show example prompts. It keeps everything inside it looking precisely as intended.

Try it yourself

The best way to make these stick is to use all of them in one small document. Open any AI chat tool and try this:

Write me a short recipe for scrambled eggs using markdown. Use a heading
for the title, a numbered list for the steps, put the key temperature in
bold, and add a link to a cooking website for more tips.

Look at the result and match each part to what you learned above. The heading, the numbered steps, the bold text, and the link should all be there, spelled out in the symbols you now recognise.

A common early stumble

A common early stumble is forgetting the space after a symbol, writing #Heading instead of # Heading, or -Milk instead of - Milk. Many tools quietly forgive this, but some do not, and the formatting silently fails.

If a heading or list ever refuses to appear, check for that missing space first. It is the single most common cause, and once you get into the habit the problem disappears.

Next steps

You now know enough markdown to read and write the vast majority of what you will ever meet. Next, we will look at why AI tools lean on markdown so heavily, and how knowing it makes you noticeably better at working with them.