MEPX
Chapter 8 of 10All chapters
  1. 1What punctuation is for
  2. 2Commas
  3. 3Colons and semicolons
  4. 4Apostrophes
  5. 5Dashes, hyphens and brackets
  6. 6Quotation marks
  7. 7Sentence endings
  8. 8Lists and bullets
  9. 9Numbers, dates and abbreviations
  10. 10Checking punctuation

Chapter 8 of 10

Lists and bullets

Punctuating structure.

Consistency

Either every bullet is a full sentence with a full stop, or none are. Mixing fragments and sentences in one list is the most common formatting error.

  • Introduce a bulleted list with a colon when the lead-in is a complete sentence.
  • Keep bullets parallel in grammatical form.

Semicolons in lists

When items contain internal commas, separate them with semicolons. It is the clearest use of the mark and the least known.