How can I highlight syntax like it appears on stackoverflow?

Suppose I am writing a post and want to highlight only a couple of characters: like this. How can I achieve this?

HTML language includes a special tag for displaying inline code. To apply it to your text, switch to the ‘Text’ visual editor tab and place the <code> tag before your bit of code, and the </code> tag afterwards.

If you want to use the backtick ` character for highlighting code like you do on Stack Overflow, check out this plugin by Tom McFarlin.