I’ve been using Markdown since 2006 and for me it’s always been: *emphasis* (i.e. italic) **strong emphasis** (i.e. bold) You can use underscores in exactly

I’ve been using Markdown since 2006 and for me it’s always been: *emphasis* (i.e. italic) **strong emphasis** (i.e. bold) You can use underscores in exactly the same way, but the reason I’ve stuck purely to asterisks is that it’s just slightly easier to type and I think it’s slightly more readable when I’m reading an un-rendered Markdown document, so I appreciate the syntax that John Gruber chose here.