Emphasizing a region in Org mode

One of the most basic features of Org mode is its markup. It is basically the Markdown of the Emacs world (although some people, like Karl Voit, claim that it’s superior to Markdown), and it lets do basic things like italic, bold or verbatim very easily – at least if you’re writing text. I, on the other hand, happen to edit text pretty often. This is very different from writing. When I write, typing a slash before and after something I want to emphasize is easy. When I edit and just want to make some text bold, putting stars around it is much less convenient.