The first thing you need to know is that Markdown is a lightweight markup language for plain text editing. R Markdown is the RStudio flavored version of Markdown.
Writing in Markdown is simple because there isn’t much to worry about other than your writing. There aren’t very many bells and whistles in R Markdown, just plain text.

To write in R Markdown you start with an R Markdown file -rather than an R script -. You’ll also need to load a couple of libraries. The `install.packages()` lines you’ll need to run only once. …

I’m writing my dissertation right now. I feel terrible that it took me longer than a year to get started. I loved the topic, I picked it myself. I knew what I wanted to say, but putting fingertips to keyboard was very difficult for me. There were days where I just would stare at my screen for hours, unable to start. So to cope, I started doing what I have always done when I am stressed out, I started to made fun of what’s causing me stress.

So this turns into casually writing about my research and how I am…