Markdown is meant to be consumable as text. I imagine a particular subset of it would be acceptable to readers who aren't familiar with the [format][1].

There're things that're little hairy. Like the use of ## to denote headings clashes with hashtags, so using the underline "----" might be more practical.

> Line based quoting, while not normal syntax, is more obvious to me that it's a quote.

[1]: http://assemble.io/docs/Cheatsheet-Markdown.html "Cheatsheet"