Shruti KaushikText wrapped in double asterisks, **like this**, pasted into LinkedIn, which shows the asterisks literally instead of making the text bold. The free checker at klype.ai/check flags it as "Markdown asterisks". It is a lighter finding: the checker deducts less for it than for an invented story or an unsourced figure, since it is quick to fix.
What it looks like
- **Lesson one:** know your buyer before you write.
- This is where most founders get stuck: **distribution**.
- **Key takeaway** - consistency beats intensity.
Example text on this page is written to show the pattern. Figures and people in it are illustrative, not reported.
Why readers distrust it
This is the most direct tell there is. LinkedIn does not render markdown, so a post with **bold** in it shows the reader the raw formatting from a chat window. It says that the text was copied from an assistant and posted without being read, which is a harder admission than any phrasing could make. Even readers who use assistants themselves read the asterisks as carelessness.
Why it shows up in generated drafts
Chat assistants format their replies in markdown, and bold labels are part of their default style for lists and emphasis. The characters survive copy and paste, and the LinkedIn editor leaves them exactly as they are.
How the free checker spots it
The checker looks for any run of text wrapped in double asterisks on a single line and quotes the first match. Single asterisks, underscores, markdown headings with # and other formatting are not checked by this rule.
The checker runs in your browser; nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
How to fix it
- Delete the asterisks. In almost every case the sentence reads fine without emphasis.
- If you want a label to stand out, put it on its own line. LinkedIn has no bold, and the Unicode bold tricks some tools offer are unreadable to screen readers.
- Read the draft once in the LinkedIn editor before posting. Formatting that looked fine in a chat window is visible there.
Before and after
**Lesson one:** know your buyer. **Lesson two:** write for them, not for your peers. **Lesson three:** check every draft before it goes out.
The post that brought in our first inbound call was not the one I was proudest of. It answered a question a prospect had asked me that week, in the words he used. The posts I wrote for other founders got comments from other founders.
The rewrite removes the pattern without adding anything the author could not stand behind.
Test your draft
The checker reports every pattern it finds, not only this one.
Common questions
Does LinkedIn support any text formatting?
Not in the post editor. Bold, italics and headings from markdown or a word processor are shown as plain characters or dropped. Line breaks and blank lines are the only structure available, which is why paragraphing matters more on LinkedIn than elsewhere.
What about the Unicode bold letters some tools use?
They display as bold on most screens, but they are different characters from ordinary letters, so screen readers spell them out letter by letter and search does not match them. The checker does not flag them, but they are a worse choice than plain text.
Why is this a light finding in the checker if it is such a clear tell?
Because it is also the easiest to fix and says nothing about the writing itself. The score penalty is small; the reader's reaction to a published post with asterisks is not.