The meaning of media

How Markdown affects my thinking

Writing in Markdown has really slowed my writing. I feel myself thinking a lot about formatting and not about the content of my writing. Although Markdown as a medium is taking a step towards the future, I feel like it removes the authenticity of writing. Writing has always been a reflection of my thoughts, and the words I choose and the syntax I choose to write in have always been a reflection of my emotions. Markdown provides affordances such as more modern formatting and better compatibility with publishing technologies. However, some limitations I encountered while writing in Markdown is that I think about the presentation of my writing while I write instead of after I have finished writing, as I typically do in other text editors such as Microsoft Word.

Why I like Markdown

• You can do these bulleted list without using the mouse
• You just type and don’t have to fiddle with highlighting the words you want to format
• It is awesome because I can link my work through github and have my work linked to different stylesheets if I choose to do so in the future
• I can convert it to different formats easily

Why I don’t like Markdown

1. I have to learn more things about formatting and think ahead about how I want my writing to look
2. It takes away the authenticity of writing in that I can’t just let my words flow on paper
3. Staring at monospace text for a long time gets monotonous and the preview of Markdown can differ from what it actually looks like