Dr Clare Lynch is “chief business writing expert” at Doris and Bertie Ltd and a University of Cambridge writing instructor, she has an excellent YouTube channel that deserves more viewers.
In a recent video, she explains the official rules for punctuating bullet points, full stops or not, capitals, etc.
She gives 3 options and a warning:
Colon: no capitals, no full stops
The long hand version with capitals, and full stops
For writing: semi colons
Don’t mix sentence styles
Back at McKinsey in the 1990s, we were taught to write paragraphs in bullet point form but starting with what we called a “clunk”, with a heavy paragraph sign as the bullet point anchor (a pilcrow), and leave the full stop out after the last sentence (but use them for other sentences in the bullet point paragraph).
In presentations? First rule avoid bullet points if you can. If you to include some sort of list to make your point on a slide:
- I try to keep the text super short (even shorter than Clare in the above examples)
- Try using some repetition: Higher sales, higher market share, lower costs (“business poetry”)
- And pay close attention to the length of the text I am writing, I want all text boxes to be roughly the same in terms of length. Yes, I admit that I sometimes “stuff” a super short bullet point with a non-essential word to make it look prettier…