Re: leading into a list

Subject: Re: leading into a list
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 19:08:03 -0400




John Wilcox wrote:



We set the To phrase as a heading (5). That way we don't need no steenking
punctuation.


This is the best response so far, but nobody has really given a good and thorough answer to the question asked.

There are two general ways to approach lists. One way is to treat a typical list as a long sentence with inserted line breaks and dots. You will see this in publications that are "conservative" in their editorial approach in general. That's a polite way of saying stuffy or stodgy.

In this approach, seen fairly often in legal documents and presidential proclamations, each list entry ends with the appropriate punctuation and begins with a lowercase letter unless the list consists of complete sentences or paragraphs.

Example
========

The house is

• large,
• white,
• Victorian,
• and too close to the road;

so the Zoning Board of Appeals is soliciting

• opinions
• advice
• and nosy neighbors.

========

You don't see this style very much in technical writing, but some people still prefer it.

Mark Baker, some years ago, made the point that this style is a form of double marking. Each item is marked by both the bullet and the punctuation. This kind of redundancy is unnecessary and possibly slows the reading process.

The other way to approach lists is with a single marking style, letting the line break-bullet combo serve the purpose, deprecating the punctuation and conjunctions.

Example
========

The house is

• Large
• White
• Victorian
• Too close to the road

So the Zoning Board of Appeals is soliciting

• Opinions
• Advice
• Nosy neighbors

========

Within these two general styles, there are variations. Some people still want the introductory colon in all cases. Some people differentiate based on different types of introductory phrases or clauses. (I think that the widespread use of PowerPoint is pushing people toward fewer colons, because they really look superfluous in presentation graphics. In fact, in that context, the terminal periods are often omitted in lists consisting of sentences.) Some people use the Heading 5 copout ;-)

It is a general consensus that list items should maintain parallelism within one list. If one item is a noun, then all items have to be nouns or noun phrases. If one item is a gerund phrase, then they all have to be. If one is a sentence predicate (with the intro being the subject), then they all have to be. And in this last case, it's a matter of house style whether the list is considered a series of sentences, each of which ends in a period, or not.

Further, in a given document, it is perfectly all right to have a list that consists of fragments (no terminal punctuation) and a list that consists of sentences (with terminal punctuation).

The biggest editorial challenge I run across is the situation where the list consists of fragments, but on one or two of the items further explanation is needed. This sometimes results in recasting the whole list, but it can usually be handled either with the judicious use of a semicolon or by dropping the explanatory second sentence into an indented paragraph under the list item.


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Follow-Ups:

References:
RE: leading into a list: From: John Wilcox

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