How To Make Bold And Italics In PMs, If You Can't Make Backticks Work

Sometimes I want to bold or italicize a word in a PM, because I don't know how to format long PMs nicely like I can in a regular post. I've been playing with the allowed markup PMing myself, and weird things happen. First off, I don't know the format for the backticks (the left-leaning apostrophe key to the left of the 1 key), and I wish I could make paragraphs, but haven't figured out how yet.
See, new nice paragraph, so this is easier to read. The only two useful codes that appear to work in a PM (I don't need to change the font or it's color) is em (italics), and strong (bold). Here's how to reliably make bold or italicized text in a PM.
I'm going to use parentheses () in the examples instead of the correct less than/greater than signs. Replace the () with less than/greater than signs in the PM.
The code for italics is em, the code for bold is strong, so to make text italicized, do this:
(em href="")this will be italicized(/em)
The only space is before the href. For bold text, type this:
(strong href="")this will be bolded(/strong)
Remember to replace ( with the less than sign (Shift+comma), and replace ) with greater than (Shift+period)
Congratulations, I just made the most boring thread ever. Dunhills suck!!! Discuss...