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Bulleted (and numbered) lists

Bullet points begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop when:

they are used as stand alone statements
when they are full sentences that follow a lead-in sentence.

Example

The committee came to two important conclusions:

Officers will develop guidelines for future investigations.
Research should be funded in the three priority areas.

Bullet points that complete a lead-in sentence:

are not punctuated, but take a full stop on the final point
do not have and at the end of the second last point
should all have parallel grammatical structure.

Example

The data is important for:

assessing agricultural productivity
conducting cost-benefit analyses.

Not:

The data are important for:

The assessment of agricultural productivity;
Conducting cost-benefit analyses; and
To develop solutions.

Numbered (or ordered) lists

Use ordered lists with numbers or letters instead of bullets to show priority or chronology when the list or where items need to be identified for later reference.

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Last updated 2 August 2005