Text is a value like any other, and it can be stored, joined, and repeated. The moment you can treat text as a value, formatting stops feeling like a special feature and becomes ordinary building.
About 2 min of reading
Build a message from a value that changes.
Store a name as text.
Before you run it, say out loud what it will print. Then open the answer.
Join a greeting to it. The space lives inside the quotes.
Before you run it, say out loud what it will print. Then open the answer.
Repeat a dash twenty times to draw a rule.
Before you run it, say out loud what it will print. Then open the answer.
Put a number inside text with the f form. The braces hold the name, not the text.
Before you run it, say out loud what it will print. Then open the answer.
Quotes mark where text starts and stops. Inside them, a character is just a character, so a digit is text and not a number. Forgetting the quotes turns text into a name, and the computer then complains that the name was never filled.
You could type the whole message at once, or build it from pieces. Building from pieces is the habit that pays off, because the pieces are values that change at run time while the frame around them stays fixed.
first = "Ada"
print("Hello, " + first + "!")The plus joins text end to end. The spaces are inside the quotes on purpose, because a space outside the quotes is not a value at all. Joining is how a message is assembled.
print("-" * 20)Star repeats text a set number of times, which is how a rule or a bar is drawn. Repeating only works on text, so "5" 3 gives 555 while 5 3 gives 15. The kind decides again.
score = 42
print(f"Score: {score}")The f before the quotes lets a name sit inside braces, and the computer swaps in its value. This is the readable way to mix text and values, and it is one value at the end.
Each one is defined here on this site. Open the entry for the full definition and the other words it points at.