To bullet, or not

Should you use bulleted lists in your writing? I go back and forth on this thought. On the pro side, bulleted lists can make a document easier to scan and can make important points more obvious and easier to read. On the con side, using bulleted lists can be too much of a crutch. I frequently find that people include long bulleted lists instead of thinking and writing about the topic at hand.

To be clear, bullets serve two functions. In narrative, they offset the components of a list, making them easier to read. The same list could just as easily be inset, using semicolons to delimit the elements. In an outline, they simply substitute for numbered points (it’s easier to use bullets than numbers when you’re outlining, since you may not have all of the list points worked out). In outlines (or notes, lectures, etc.) there’s no problem with bullets, they just make things easier to read. The question at hand is whether they belong in formal writing.

The general consensus seems to be that bulleted lists are not acceptable in academic writing. According to the Chicago Style Manual:

The use of bullets (heavy dots) in place of enumeration is sometimes resorted to, but these may be considered cumbersome, especially in scholarly work” (314).

The APA style suggests that you abandon them completely.

Don’t include bulleted lists. If you cannot paraphrase, then include a table or appendix that presents your list of items.

I suspect that the disdain for bulleted lists in academic writing is partially due to tradition and partly an attempt to maintain a sense of narrative. Bulleted lists make it all too easy to stop writing and start dumping information on the page. And academic topics tend to yield a lot of information to be dumped. Getting rid of bullets is a good way of paring down your paper to the pith. (The same goes for numbered lists — it’s not the bullet character that offends, it’s the idea of simply listing off everything you need to say.)

In business writing, bullets seem to be a plus. Most business documents are written for speed and clarity. Nobody will complement you on your writing, and nobody will spend more that the absolute minimum amount of time reading what you wrote. So you might as well make your documents quickly scannable with bulleted lists.

Technical writing, such as manuals, how to’s, lecture notes, etc. — in my opinion — are the best place to use bulleted lists. In these contexts, the purpose of your communication is to very clearly document how to do something without going into endless detail. Using bulleted lists can be a great way to do this — they make important points stand out and they can help indicate an information hierarchy (which is traditionally done using headers, subheaders and pure sentence structure).

As far as other types or writing go… there are no rules. You can use them if you find them convenient. Bulleted lists are really popular on the web, though perhaps overused (even by me). Often they act more like graphics than writing elements — they are simply used to call attention to each piece of a seriated list. However, it might look weird to have bullet points in, say, a journal entry.

Given the above considerations of the types of writing for which bulleted lists are acceptable, I propose the following rule of thumb:

If your document can be classified as “literature” (academic literature, political literature, legal literature, literature in the traditional sense, etc.), do not use bulleted lists. Otherwise, use them sparingly.

Hopefully, the formulation of this rule will at least help me remember when to use them.