The markup should not hinder reading of the [RawText] of the page. 

Only characters rarely used in normal text should be used for markup. When a common character is used (like a dash "-" or a slash "/"), it shoudn't be used alone by itself. Escaping should be rarely necessary.

The markup should be visually separated from the content text, it should be obvious what is text and what is content.

[AvoidTextTags], as they form words that make text hard to read.

Make it easy to find in [RawText] parts corresponding to fragments of [RenderedPage].

Avoid [InvisibleMarkup].

There is a nice article about [[http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition.aspx|The Science of Word Recognition]] on the Microsoft typography page. Their software might suck, but they do have great researchers ;)