Discourse apparently supports Markdown; you can add a Markdown app to iOS if you choose; Word will do whatever it damn well pleases. I do like me a text editor that lets me make my own mistakes, and show me just what I typed…
Word probably has a setting for that. It has a lot of adjustability in what automatic changes it makes.
My phone, on the other hand, swipe can be tiresome at times.
Word and Outlook both randomly decide to switch parts of my text to the French spell-checker. Then it redlines my English words and Spell-check keeps giving me proposed French spellings. Highlighting that portion of text and clicking on English as the spell-check language does nothing.
This.
You have to put those bits in the {FANCY brackets}…
Rarely. “Parenthetical” is much more common than “parentheses”. Using “round brackets”, or just “brackets” if there are no other types, is a little like the way we use “grade-ten student” instead of “sophomore “ in high school.