Bulleted lists

Bulleted lists help make information more scannable and easier to understand. If a sentence contains more than three items or ideas, we recommend breaking them up into a bulleted list.

• Capitalize the first word of every bullet.
• Don’t use a bulleted list for only one item.
• Keep each item succinct for scannability (for example, 1 or 2 sentences each).
• When using “and” or “or” at the end of each bullet point, use a comma and bold the “and”/”or” at the end of each bullet point.
• If your list has more than 7 items, use subheads to break out the list into smaller bullet lists.
• Use parallel construction within the same list. (Make each bullet start with a verb; or make each a noun phrase; etc.)

Punctuation for bullet lists

• When the list is made up of fragments, don’t use ending periods.
• When the list is made up of full sentences, use ending periods. (Example: Each item could be a complete sentence if it stood alone, even without the intro sentence or header.)
• Don’t use a period at the end of the last bullet in a series of bullets.

Note: Punctuation of bullets are determined by list, not by page. It’s OK to have a list of bullets that are fragments (that don’t use periods) on the same page as a list of bullets that are full sentences (that use periods). Just use the correct house style of punctuation for each type of list.