Punctuation in bullet text?

Subject: Punctuation in bullet text?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 07 May 2004 11:04:43 -0400


Peter Liu wondered: <<I'm converting a paragraph of content to bullet text for a online course. I have 2 questions: 1. Do I capitalize the first word in each bullet point? 2. Do I add period to the end of each bullet?>>

The first thing to get straight is that each bullet in a given list should be grammatically parallel: that is, they should all be complete sentences, or should all be sentence fragments that complete the thought that introduces the list (e.g., "the following components of a PC are crucial").

If you are creating complete sentences, capitalize and punctuate the same way you would for any other grammatically correct sentence. If you're creating fragments, you've already broken the biggest grammatical rule, and thus, there's no reason for the sentences to be capitalized or punctuated according to grammar. That being the case, it's more important to be consistent (all begin with caps or none; all end in periods, or none) than it is to be grammatical*.

* Grammar exists to make things comprehensible--it's the set of unwritten rules we've all agreed govern communication using words--so even inherently ungrammatical sentence fragments must still be sufficiently grammatical to be easily comprehensible.

<<Proofreading literally means reading a document without audio. It is used to:
- identify and understand the context and reviewing the text in its entirety...>>

Since each bullet in your example is an imperative statement, you could capitalize it and end it with a period. But given that each bullet completes the introductory thought, there's no need to do so. In the past, I've suggested ending each line with a comma or semicolon, and ending the last with a period, because this turns the bulleted list into the grammatical equivalent of a sentence containing internal punctuation. That's correct, but far fussier than necessary.

--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)


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punctuation in bullet text: From: Peter Liu

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