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This text will enable you to practice using all of the formatting elements available in the basic version of Markdown.
Remember when you learned the alphabet? You didn’t just memorize all 26 letters in one go—with both the upper- and lower case versions and the sounds—instead, you learned a few at a time and used them by finding them on book covers and such and then by reading and spelling them. By actually using them in practice, you cemented your knowledge of them. In other words, learning to read was less a memorization game and more like building a tower of blocks ever higher.
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Or like in a complex video game. Modern controllers have as many as 15 buttons and 2 analog sticks, and some games let players use those buttons in seemingly endless combinations to have their characters run, jump, fight, and do hundreds of other actions and chains of actions. But if the game asked players to do all the moves from the first minute, they would get overwhelmed with the steepness of the learning curve and would abandon the game. Thus, savvy game designers construct early levels to use only a few simple, single-button actions at first. As the simple actions become second nature to players, the designers introduce new and more complex ones one at a time so that the player follows a smooth, shallow learning curve that maximizes enjoyment and minimizes frustration.
Markdown isn’t very complicated, but to the newcomer who isn’t already familiar with HTML, it can seem like a lot to remember how to use headings, lists, bold, and the other elements. So it’s important to practice, to smooth out the learning curve as soon as possible.
Of course you can cheat on this assignment. I can’t stop you. The assignment asked you to type these words out from scratch, but you could copy and paste the text right off the page, and then just add in the Markdown syntax for the bold and italics and so on, and no one would ever know. If you’re clever and technically minded, you could take the source html and run it backwards through a Markdown compiler or something and have it do all the work for you in an instant.
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But what would be the point? The assignment is pass/fail anyway, and there’s no danger of failing it by doing it wrong since you won’t be graded on achievement but instead on effort. And when you think about it, grades are meaningless anyway—the only thing that really matters is whether you learn how to use Markdown. Doing so will make you more employable, and it will make the rest of this course easier. And how do you do it? By using it. And this assignment is a good excuse to use it and therefore learn it, so if you do cheat, the only one who will suffer is you, because it’ll take that much longer to complete future class assignments and get good at Markdown. Funny, huh?
Here’s a random blockquote:
Never follow anyone else’s path. Unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path. Then by all means follow that path.
—Ellen Degeneres
And here's a block of code:
This is a robot speaking. You can tell I'm a robot because my speech looks like it was produced on an old typewriter. Typewriters are the ancestors of robots, so I guess that makes sense. Beep boop.
Here is a section with some ordered and unordered lists for you to practice making. It also throws in some third-level headings so you can practice those too.
I’m proud of you for getting this far.
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Oh, I almost forgot—let’s use at least one horizontal rule:
And one last blockquote:
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.
—Jack Handey
That’s all, folks.