Tip of the month from PRC
October 1998

Using bulleted lists


Updates:
Three new sections included (9 October '98)
Comments from Mike Broderick included (8 October '98)
Capital letter..." section added. (6 October '98) 


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Tip of the month is edited by Peter Ring, PRC (Peter Ring Consultants, Denmark)
- consultants on how to write user friendly manuals
If you have corrections, better texts or suggestions for improvements, please let me know.

This tip was originally inspired by Scott Miller, who on 30 June '98 wrote on TECHWR-L:

"I also can't stand bulleted lists that attempt to be a sentence, like this:

You can

I think it's time to state my personal wiewpoints on the - especially for technical writers - very important tool: bulleted lists.

The tip was further improved by feedback from readers. The last three points on the list are based on an e-mail from Mike Broderick, InDoc, Germany.


Contents


Why bulleted lists?

Because bulleted lists make sentences which includes lists a lot easier to survey.

Let's take Scott's example above, un-bulleted:

"You can walk to the market wearing a leopard-skin pillbox hat, go swimming, if you have a swimming suit and a bathing cap and don't mind the danger of sharks, crocodiles, and pollution, or go home." Sure, it takes up less space. But is it more reader friendly? Hardly! Especially because you here have lists in lists. Let's try the other extreme: "You can ... Takes up much more space - yes. But also a lot easier to read and understand, - isn't it?

Like it or not from an academic linguistic viewpoint, but it's more user friendly to most people (except maybe lawyers, patent people, and some scientists.)

Due to their graphic separation and placement, bulleted lists are easier to survey than lists in sentences is elementary. A bulleted list is a common visualisation tool we are all familiar with.

And when writing manuals, the most important issue is to make ALL the readers understand what we are writing - right?

Therefore, if you want to write in a user friendly way, use bullets wherever you have got lists!


Full stop or not after a point of a bulleted list?

In the following "full stop" also includes "!" and "?" where appropriate.

There are no fixed rules here; you can do as you like, so once again I have tried to look at it from the viewpoint of user-friendliness.

My personal preferences are:


Capital letter or not after a bullet?

I have looked it up in my two "bibles" on this field: I basically agree with "The Chicago Manual of Style" and use lower case letters only if the bulleted point is the grammatical continuation of the multi-ended sentence leading to the bulleted points, see e.g. the "Full stop" list above.

Thanks to Brigitte Starkey for putting my attention to this point.


When to use numbered and when to use bulleted items?

See "tip of the month" for April 1996 : " Bullets and numbering".


How many points are sensible, considering our short-term memory?


How should multi-level lists be constructed?

Example:

What bullet symbols are to be used?

That is perfectly up to your personal taste - and company standards! Just make sure, you select some symbols which are easy to find in a text, and that the superior level symbols are stronger than the minor levels (please note, that in HTML, these symbols are browser determinated!).

If you make on-line documents (e.g. Windows help), make sure to select symbols available on the readers' computers, or - if possible - include the fonts used with the file.


If you disagree with these ideas - or have other relevant points, experiences, or ideas +/-, please e-mail me !

Ideas for new "Tip of the month" subjects are VERY welcome, too!


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