Markdown is "real plain text". Why not just use letters and avoid punctuation ... that's all Markdown is: punctuation. > Homer was able to write the fall of t

Markdown is "real plain text". Why not just use letters and avoid punctuation ... that's all Markdown is: punctuation. > Homer was able to write the fall of troy and Shakespeare Hamlet without bold text. Oh really? Have you ever seen a manuscript? Unlike handwritten text, plain text doesn't provide a means to underline, use italics, subscripts and superscripts, etc. Things like Markdown provide conventions for denoting such things in plain text.