Bulleted Lists

[Wayne Douglass <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM>]

Janice Gelb's and Cathy Christian's posts on bulleted lists are a welcome
note of sanity regarding the issue of bulleted lists. When I wrote the first
style guide for my department in 1981, I followed the principles they
expound simply because everything else seemed unnecessarily complicated.
Bulleted lists in technical communication are more design elements than
"real" sentences, and brooding over the circumstances when they should or
should not be introduced by a colon is simply not worth the trouble. You
might as well agonize over the punctuation of headers and footers.

Janice Gelb's and Cathy Christian's guidelines are logical and simple to
apply. The only grammatical element I would insist upon is parallel
construction in the list items.

--Wayne
---------------------------------------------
Wayne Douglass        phone: 408-542-2139
Verity, Inc.            FAX: 408-542-2040
894 Ross Road        mailto:wayned -at- verity -dot- com
Sunnyvale, CA 94089    http://www.verity.com
    "Connecting People With Information"
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