Several different plug-ins are available that add alternate text formatters to Movable Type's standard choices (None and Convert Line Breaks). Brad Choate's Textile plug-in is perhaps the most popular of the bunch. Based on Dean Allen's text-to-HTML conversion tool, the Textile plug-in allows you to use defined text formatting cues in your entries, which are then converted into markup when the entry is published. For example, creating an unordered list with a third-level heading is as simple as this:
h3. Fruit
* Apples
* Oranges
* Bananas