A lot of us layfolk have probably used or have been exposed to markdown without knowing, it's used on lemmy for example but is offered with a nice UI toolbar that functions with simple mouse clicks. You may have used some basics of it on discord or other chat applications.

This tutorial teaches you the syntax used to do basic text formatting, lists, quoting, etc.
It's roughly 20-30 minutes to get through, very simple and straight forward, so check it out if you're interested.