My friend Watts Martin is back with some additional thoughts on Markdown. A year ago he wrote a post complaining about the ankle biters who claim you can’t do serious writing with Markdown. I responded positively to his post and noted that even though I’m all in on Org mode and use it for virtually everything I write—even iMessages through the wonderful emacs-everywhere—it’s not really a good solution unless you’re using Emacs (although some people like Karl Voit disagree).
These days, Martin is an Emacs user and does use Org mode a lot but he still prefers to write his documentation and prose in Markdown. The reason for that is partly that he’s used to it but also because he has tools to work with it and—at least in the case of documentation—has to worry about collaboration.
It’s hard to disagree with anything he says although, again, Karl Voit strongly disagrees with the assertion that neither is better than the other, even when considered solely as markup languages. Even Martin appears to agree that Org is the better tool when you can consider its normal environment.
As for the original question that got all this started, of course Markdown or Org mode can be used for serious writing as plenty of writers demonstrate everyday. It’s only the ankle biters—probably the same ones who claim em-dashes are used only by AIs—who say otherwise.