Markdown for drafting

Markdown offers many advantages over other formats when drafting early versions of documents.

Like many markup languages, Markdown joins adjacent lines of text into a paragraph.

For example, one can write a Markdown paragraph like this:

This is the first sentence.
This is the second sentence.
Markdown is a simple markup language that can be used for a variety of writing tasks.
This is the last sentence.

The text above renders like this once converted into another format:

This is the first sentence. This is the second sentence. Markdown is a simple markup language that can be used for a variety of writing tasks. This is the last sentence.

Advantages of one sentence per line

Writing one sentence per line offers writers many advantages.

Prevent repetitive sentences

First, it makes it easy to see any repetitious language that can make writing monotonous.

In the example above, it is much easier to see the repetition at the beginning of each sentence (“this is…”) in the Markdown source block than it is in the rendered block (which is how one would write in a Word processor).

Prevent sentences from being too long

Similar to how one sentence per line makes it easy for writers to spot repetition, it also makes it easy to track sentence length.

In the example, sentence 3 is drastically longer than the surrounding sentences. Again, it is easier to spot this in the Markdown source block than it is in the rendered version.

While not all sentences need to be similar in length, the visual aid helps the writer see what sentences could be split into smaller, potentially easier to understand sentences.