G'day, Simon et al
That sounds like too much hard work! Which suggests that an entirely different strategy might be worth considering.
I've never used WordPress, and it's not entirely clear to me whether it acts as a blog host or merely as a blog construction kit. If the latter doesn't seem to be working for you, and your wife has her own Web Site (doesn't everyone?!), I suggest you ditch WordPress and roll your own HTML. It's not necessarily difficult if you avoid Javascript. You could probably teach yourself all you need in a few days.
A good place to start is the following Web Site which offers lots of template code and easy-to-follow tutorials:–
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https://www.w3schools.com/>
Construct a simple Web page in NWP, add in a heading, a paragraph and a list. Construct a simple CSS (stylesheet) document that is referenced in the head of your HTML document and insert some code to determine text colors, indentation, the type of bullet you want in bullet lists, etc. Nothing fancy at this stage. The file with the HTML should be saved as plain text, duplicated, and the
.txt extension of the duplicate changed to
.htm to produce the file to exhibit to a Web browser. The file with the CSS code shoud be treated likewise, but use the extension
.css instead. Save and view your work in a Web browser as you go. For simple content and layouts, it's not that hard.
Once you're happy you understand how things work, agree with your wife on terms to use for delineating formatting. For example, she might write "Heading" and then the actual heading text occurs following a paragraph return. She might write "Start Numbered List", then put all the list items in subsequent paragraphs and conclude the list with "End Numbered List". Of course, you could use appropriate abbreviations, as long as their usage could not be mistaken for actual content.
When all the writing is finished, you use Find & Replace to convert her naïve markup to technical HTML markup tags as appropriate. A set of such commands could be incorporated in a Macro which your wife could summon with a keyboard shortcut while you sun yourself by the pool. When the mood moves you, check that everything looks OK in a Web browser, upload the file to the server, and grab another drink on your way back to the pool.
Admittedly, there is a bit of work needed to set up this system, but you do it only once.
I used to use Nisus Writer for coding a forum I ran many years ago, so it's quite possible to do what you need with NWP. These days, though, I find BBEdit better suited to the task.
Cheers,
Adrian