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 bulleted 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.)
• When the list is made up of fragments and one bullet contains an additional sentence, use ending periods on both the fragment and the additional sentence. To be consistent, also use ending periods on the other items in the bulleted list, even if they’re fragments.
• Don’t use a period at the end of the last bullet in a series of fragments.

Note: Punctuation of bullets is 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.