How to punctuate bullet points

Below is a transcript of the video.

A little bonus lecture for you on punctuating a form of writing that’s very common and very useful in business writing - bullet points.

Now, as with so many aspects of punctuation, different style guides take different approaches.

So your first port of call should be to check what your organisation’s chosen style guide has to say about bullet points, whether that’s an in-house guide or a published guide like the Chicago Manual of Style.

If you don’t have a style guide to refer to, here are the guidelines most people recommend.

GUIDELINES

First of all, introduce your bulleted list with a colon. And, by the way, there’s no need to include a dash with it too.

In the words of R. L. Trask, author of the Penguin Guide to Punctuation, a colon is “never, never, never [ALL IN BOLD] followed by a hyphen or dash - in spite of what you might have been taught in school”

Then, if your bulleted list contains fragments - in other words if they’re NOT whole sentences - I’d ditch the punctuation all together. No need for full stops or commas or semicolons or anything like that after any of the listed items. Modern punctuation tends to keep things clean and simple.

And notice, too, how each item starts with a lower case letter.

In contrast, if your bulleted list is made up of full sentences, like this one, then start with an uppercase letter and use a full-stop at the end of each item. Just as you would with a normal sentence.

Sometimes, the items in your bulleted list might continue the sentence that began when you introduced the list, as here: ‘The merger with SinoWidget will allow us to diversify our products…’ etc. 

In this case, most guidelines recommend separating the listed items with a semicolon.

Again, notice that because the bulleted list is effectively a single sentence broken up line by line, each item in the list starts with a lower case. Notice too that the penultimate item requires an ‘and’ to ensure the text makes sense as a complete sentence. And to finish the sentence, the final bullet point ends with a full-stop.

Now, you may also have noticed that the use of the colon in bullet points breaks the usual rule we saw in an earlier lecture that a colon should follow a full sentence.

For example, the ‘The merger with SinoWidget will allow us to’ is not a complete sentence. 

Overall, I find this approach with all these semicolons rather old fashioned.

I much prefer shorter, sharper bullet points with minimal punctuation like the first example we saw. It looks cleaner and more scannable to me - which is the whole point of bullet points.

ONE FINAL TIP

Oh, and one final tip for effective bullet points that’s not so much about the punctuation, but is really important. Make sure your listed items are consistent. 

For example, the items in this list are all consistent because each one is a noun or thing word: diversification, financing, risk and so on.

What you want to avoid is bullet points like this... where the listed items aren’t consistent in this way. 

For example, the first bullet point uses a verb or action word, diversify, while the second bullet uses a noun phrase ‘access to international financing’. The other bullet points are similarly inconsistent. 

This kind of inconsistency is distracting and potentially confusing for readers so it’s definitely best avoided.

TO SUM UP

So to sum up, for effective bullet points, keep them clear, consistent and simple. Ideally keep them short too and with minimal punctuation.

For more writing advice, enrol in my online course, Writing With Confidence, available at the Doris and Bertie Writing School.

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