Transcript
If you ever get confused about how to punctuate bullet lists, you’re not alone. It can be very confusing.
But if you have to wonder about it every time you write one, that’s a lot of time wasted wondering. Well, by the end of this video, you won’t have to wonder anymore.
The reason it can be confusing is that a lot of it comes down to style choice. Even the style guides for the top publications have different views on it. And with all that conflicting advice out there, it can get very complicated.
Well, first check to see if your organisation has a style in place. And obviously, follow that if there is one. But if there isn’t one, here are the rules that we recommend.
Always introduce bullet lists with a colon.
There are two main types of bullet.
Those bullets that form full sentences and those bullets that don’t. We call the second type fragments.
Now, let’s look at the second type first. When each of the bullets is a fragment, so not a full sentence, you should use a lower-case letter at the beginning, no punctuation at the end, and a full-stop after the final bullet if the bullet list as a whole forms a complete sentence. You can see here that the bit that introduces the bullets is not a complete sentence, but each item when you add it completes the sentence.
Some bullet lists are really just checklists or like shopping lists.
Each bullet is very short, maybe just a word or two. And it’s almost in note form. If that’s the case, then you don’t need any punctuation after any of the bullets, not even the last one.
When you read along from the introductory line, these also sound like lists or inventories. They’re not like fluid sentences that have just been formatted differently. And as you can see, they have no final punctuation.
When each of your bullets is a full sentence, it’s very straightforward. You just follow the normal rules of writing a sentence.
Each bullet begins with a capital letter and ends with a full-stop. And the introductory bit is also a full sentence, just like in this example.
This is our recommended training approach for your company: hold a seminar for all staff on grammar and punctuation, run courses for all support staff in effective email- writing, run a half-day course for the senior managers focusing on writing board reports.
One thing you should always remember, though, is be consistent.
Don’t mix full sentence bullets and fragment bullets in the same list. And consistency overall is the key to great-looking documents.
So whether you follow our style or you follow somebody else’s, keep that in mind, and you won’t go far wrong.
Bullet points can be a very useful addition to your documents. They can make it easy for your reader to quickly take in important information or instructions.
But once you have your bullet list, how should you punctuate it? Should you use capital letters? Are semicolons involved somehow?
If you’ve ever tried to find out the answer to questions like these online, you’ll probably have seen that it can get surprisingly complicated. You could easily end up more confused than you were to begin with. But it really doesn’t have to be this difficult.
As Rob says in the video, how you should punctuate bullets comes down almost entirely to making style choices (then being consistent).
Pick a style
Some style guides will suggest that when bullets are fragments you should put a semicolon at the end of each one, write ‘and’ at the end of the next-to-last bullet, then have a full stop after the final one. This isn’t wrong – just another style (and there are many other styles). We simply prefer the clean look of minimalist punctuation.
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