Markdown for Writers: Footnotes and Code

Every essay at Palimpsest starts life as a Markdown file.

Markdown gives a draft just enough structure — headings, emphasis, links — without inviting you to adjust fonts when you should be fixing sentences. Most writers learn the basics in an afternoon. This post covers the second layer: the features our contributors and editors actually use in production, with working examples of each.

Special formatting

Beyond bold and italics, three marks earn their keep during revision, when a draft needs to show its own history:

• strike through — for a sentence marked for deletion but kept visible for review
• highlight — for a phrase an editor wants the author to look at twice
• *escaped characters* — for when you mean the asterisk literally

Writing code blocks

Even an editorial magazine quotes code now and then — a script under discussion, a stylesheet under review. Inline code is formatted by wrapping any word or words in back-ticks, like this. Larger snippets sit in their own block, fenced with triple back-ticks:

.my-link {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

If a piece leans heavily on code, syntax highlighting via Prism.js keeps it readable. Hold off until you actually need it, though — most quoted code, like most quoted prose, is better short.

Full bleed images

One useful trick for distinguishing between kinds of images is to add a #hash value to the end of the source URL, then target images containing the hash with special styling. For example:

which is styled with...

img[src$="#full"] {
    max-width: 100vw;
}

This creates full-bleed images that stretch past the text column to the edge of the window. Use them sparingly, and only when the picture carries information the prose can't: a landscape in a piece of reportage earns one, a book review usually doesn't.

Reference lists

The quick brown fox, jumped over the lazy dog.

Another way to insert links is with reference lists: the link labels sit in the prose, and the URLs gather at the end of the document, out of the way. For criticism that cites a dozen sources, this keeps the draft readable while you are still revising it — the sentence stays a sentence instead of becoming a thicket of brackets.

Creating footnotes

The quick brown fox^[1] jumped over the lazy dog^[2].

Footnotes hold the aside that would derail the paragraph but is too useful to cut — a source, a caveat, a definition. They collect automatically at the very end of the post, numbered and back-linked, so the reader can follow them or ignore them without losing the thread.

Full HTML

And perhaps the most practical part of Markdown is that you are never limited to Markdown. You can write HTML directly in a draft and it just works — embeds, custom markup, whatever the piece requires. Here's a standard YouTube embed as an example:

---

1. Foxes are red ↩︎

2. Dogs are usually not red ↩︎