An often overlooked but highly important task is documentation. It's easy to type up a few paragraphs to help spread knowledge but to really make it readable and easy to consume you're going to need Markdown.

Markdown is composed of a set of annotations you add to your document that formats your content.

Here are the most important annotations that you should be using.

Headings

Headings are created by starting a new line with a series of #s. The more #s the smaller the heading.

# Header 1
## Header 2
### Header 3
#### Header 4
##### Header 5
###### Header 6

Header 1

Header 2

Header 3

Header 4

Header 5

Header 6

Breaks

You can insert breaks (the solid horizontal lines) by typing ---. You will usually need a blank line before and after as well.

This would render a page break below this line.

---

And above this line.

It's a great way to structure content.

Text Styling

You can easily use italic, bold, and monospace text decorations.

You can easily use _italic_, 
**bold**,  and `monospace` text decorations.

Lists

Bullets:

• apples
• oranges
• pears

  * apples
  * oranges
  * pears

Numbers:

1. lather
2. rinse
3. repeat

  1. lather
  2. rinse
  3. repeat

Styling Code

Inline code can be wrapped in backticks.

Code blocks are wrapped in 3 backticks.

 Hello World!

Links

An example.

An [example](http://example.com).

Images

![Image](Icon-pictures.png "icon")

Wrapping Up

The best part about Markdown is that it's optional. You don't need to memorize every possible annotation, and even if you want to there are only a handful of them. Try out a new annotation every so often and pretty soon you'll be pushing out the cleanest, most well-organized docs and your peers will definitely notice.