Are you pulling your hair out trying to fix some mystery formating in MS Word? Or would you like to simplify the actual writing process when using LaTeX? Markdown offers a quick and simple way to write formatted documents in plaintext. It is intuitive and easy to read, but is designed to be converted to other formats such as PDF or HTML using tools such as Pandoc, the "universal document converter". This workshop will introduce Markdown and Pandoc for academic writing, as well as how they can integrate into Word or LaTeX writing workflows. We will get Pandoc set up on your machine, and look at some tools for writing Markdown.