Let the punctuation leave the room

Halfway through a difficult paragraph is an unhelpful time to become interested in brackets.

The paragraph is about a novel that tells the same event from three viewpoints. It needs to explain why the third account matters without revealing a late turn in the plot. Whether the book title is surrounded by one asterisk or two is a much smaller problem. It can still steal your attention.

A formatted Markdown editor gives those two kinds of work different places. While composing, you see the heading, emphasis or link as part of the document. Underneath, the saved file retains the text notation that makes Markdown useful outside a single app.

What are you trying to notice?

Visible formatting can help you read your own draft. A heading is recognisably a heading. A quotation is set apart. You can see whether a long list interrupts the argument without mentally translating its punctuation first.

It also changes the temptations. In a source editor, you may spend time aligning list markers or tidying link syntax. In a formatted editor, you may make a sentence bold because it has not yet earned its emphasis through the writing. Neither view supplies editorial judgement.

For the book review, a useful first pass might contain just paragraphs and three headings. Leave the caption treatment, emphasis and links until the explanation stands on its own. Formatting is then a way to reveal the intended reading order, rather than evidence that the draft is progressing.

Someone writing software documentation may want the syntax visible throughout. They might be reviewing a code change that includes the document, or checking precisely how a renderer will interpret a particular construction. That is a different job, and a source editor may serve it better.

Use the source to answer a question

There is value in looking beneath the formatted view when you have something specific to check. Does the link point to the publisher’s current book page? Is that line a heading or merely bold text? Is the image a local file or a web address?

Those are questions about the document’s structure and references. They are more productive than repeatedly switching views to reassure yourself that the file is still Markdown.

Clarity supports formatted writing and a read-only syntax view. That view lets you inspect the underlying Markdown; it is not a second place to edit it. The writing and formatting guide explains both views. If a particular source edit calls for another tool, use one deliberately, allowing the current save to finish before making changes elsewhere.

Keep the writing portable, not identical

A formatted view is an interpretation. Another app may choose different fonts, spacing or support for Markdown extensions. If a magazine will publish the review on its website, check a sample there before relying on an unusual feature. A beautiful local preview cannot establish how a different system will display the same file.

For this draft, the important decisions are simpler. The book title is identifiable. The section headings describe the review’s argument. The link to an earlier work has meaningful wording. Those choices remain intelligible even when the document looks different.

Then return to the awkward paragraph and try writing its point without any emphasis. If the contrast between the three accounts is unclear, more formatting is unlikely to make it clearer.