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Subject:Re: Colons, lists, and periods From:Jim Grey <jwg -at- ACD4 -dot- ACD -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 28 Jan 1994 08:12:43 -0500
Andrew Shires interjects:
>The trouble is that some people want to treat bulleting as a means of
>drawing attention to phrases in a complete sentence, and therefore
>want to provide semi-colons, commas, and periods, so that there is a
>complete sentence there when you strip the bullets out. This is quite
>reasonable. Others want to consider the bullets themselves as
>providing the punctuation -- and indeed they do have the effect of
>visually delimiting elements of a list -- and so feel that the
>punctuation is unnecessary. This is also quite reasonable.
>Since there are also many instances in which you can use bullets for
>listing information that would not ever be collected into a sentence,
>it is often the case that only the latter viewpoint will do.
>Therefore, in order to have consistent punctuation of our bulleted
>material, we have gone for the "bullets provide punctuation; drop the
>period" stance.
We do this, too, *except* when one or more bulleted items are multiple
sentences long. Then, we include punctuation in each item. But we try to
avoid this situation in the first place.
jim grey
jwg -at- acd4 -dot- acd -dot- com
Terre Haute, IN -- The Silicon Cornfield
