I'm not sure I understand what the first two substitutions are doing - you don't have to add a comment, but it would be nice, because if I have trouble getting it, so might other coders, especially if someone comes to the file in the future with no clue as to how this method came about.

I get that we're replacing strong / bold styles with asterisks, and italics / citations with slashes, to keep the meaning while turning into plain text, but I'm not sure about newlines and paragraphs.