There are other plain-text options you might consider.
You could use grouping characters other than quotes (parentheses, square brackets, angle brackets, braces) to distinguish map and territory.
You can also use unconventional grouping characters, like literally any punctuation marks that aren’t reserved by markdown. Just be sure to test your choices first. I’ve had some unexpected results involving the $ character on LessWrong in the past.
There are also several styles of quote marks that might be useful for this kind of differentiation. Guillemets may be especially nice here as you could point them »in for map« and «out for territory».
You could explicitly tag map and territory statements in a number of ways, as long as you write a forward explaining what you’re doing. This kind of tagging carries the advantages of being unambiguous to the reader, easy to remember, and almost certain to be rendered by screen readers. Downside is that they tend to be a bit clunky.
You could borrow namespace conventions from any programming language.
e.g. map::”thing the map says”, territory::”what’s really out there”
I’ve seen fanfic enthusiasts compare works with a similar operator:
e.g. map!”thing the map says”, territory!”what’s really out there”
You could borrow function/method syntax from programming as well. This has the advantage of already being solved for multiple parameters, in case you need something like that.
e.g. map(“thing the map says”), territory(“what’s really out there”, “closely related thing”)
Markdown also supports underline by surrounding the text with single underscores, though it looks a bit like hyperlink. … (Edit: looks like LessWrong interprets that as another way to do italic, likely to avoid the hyperlink confusion)
This is actually standard for markdown. I could believe some implementations use underscores for underline but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.
(Edited for correctness)
There are other plain-text options you might consider.
You could use grouping characters other than quotes (parentheses, square brackets, angle brackets, braces) to distinguish map and territory.
You can also use unconventional grouping characters, like literally any punctuation marks that aren’t reserved by markdown. Just be sure to test your choices first. I’ve had some unexpected results involving the $ character on LessWrong in the past.
There are also several styles of quote marks that might be useful for this kind of differentiation. Guillemets may be especially nice here as you could point them »in for map« and «out for territory».
You could explicitly tag map and territory statements in a number of ways, as long as you write a forward explaining what you’re doing. This kind of tagging carries the advantages of being unambiguous to the reader, easy to remember, and almost certain to be rendered by screen readers. Downside is that they tend to be a bit clunky.
You could borrow namespace conventions from any programming language. e.g. map::”thing the map says”, territory::”what’s really out there”
I’ve seen fanfic enthusiasts compare works with a similar operator:
e.g. map!”thing the map says”, territory!”what’s really out there”
You could borrow function/method syntax from programming as well. This has the advantage of already being solved for multiple parameters, in case you need something like that.
e.g. map(“thing the map says”), territory(“what’s really out there”, “closely related thing”)
This is actually standard for markdown. I could believe some implementations use underscores for underline but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.
… so it is! My mistake. I’ll remove that line.