The formatting is known as "Markdown". There are sometimes a couple different ways of doing each formatting.
You can use asterisks or underscores each side for italic/bold. You can use asterisks or dashes at the start of a line for a list.
Headers are made by different numbers of hashes at the beginning of the line, the ones at the end don't matter. There should be 5 levels of headings (1 to 5 hashes, see below). You can also put equals symbols under a line to make the large heading, and dashes for second heading:
heading 1
=========
heading 2
---------
Hash headings:
heading 1
heading 2
heading 3
heading 4
heading 5