Full stops1 at the end of bullet pointed text: yes or no?
I just realised that half of my slides have them, and half don’t. I went through and added punctuation to the lines that were missing it, went for a cup of tea, then came back and deleted all the full stops again.
The presentation has to be sent to my supervisor within the next 80 minutes…
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1. Periods, if you’re in North America. Dots, wherever you are.
No.
Oh good, a unanimous decision. My boss can put his own full stops in if he wants them.
Thanks mate!
No worries Cath.
My accountant will be in touch.
Do I need to find an earlier draft and count the dots?
Now, how about removing those bullet points.
Just kidding ;)
giggle
Nice one, Neil :)
No. (Oh, damn, Richard got there first). But at least you now have N=2.
So that would be…
Yes?
Er…. yes. Don’t confuse me with statistics.
Very Wilde thread.
Given that bullet points denote a list, shouldn’t it be a comma?
If it’s a list, then you should use semicolons. Probably their only known, legitimate use.
Oh ball cocks; semicolons have lots of legitimate uses.
I could live with semicolons.
I don’t use full stops on bullet points and I’m a bit strict when it comes to powerpoint in general. People loath going through presentations with me because I am the uber-picky style freak. Be consistent throughout.
It doesn’t matter whether you full stop or not, as long as you do it to every damn bullet point.
This turned into a much longer answer than I expected! It’s out of my hands now, missing full stops and all. Thanks all for your feedback!
Discussions about style are like that. My first day working as an editor I precipitated a 4 hour argument among the Nature sub-editors by asking about the correct capitalisation of Kerguelen Islands.
Oh my, that sounds fascinating. And you came back the next day?
I’ve just discovered the existence of the interrobang. Now I really really want to use it in the second draft of the presentation, currently in progress.
Never mind islands, we don’t need anything fancy for four days of deliberation, just ask about the humble comma. (See Henry’s post on Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.)
I worked in a Job Centre one summer, taking calls from employers, typing their ads onto those little cards and putting them on the board. I quickly realised that one of our colleagues who helped match job seekers to jobs had, for years, been sending internal memos to my department saying “I fixed your advertisement for spelling and grammer” (sic). Amazingly, no-one else had picked up on his mistake (which I guess means that he had a very good point), and they were delighted when I sent him a memo back, pointing it out and copying my whole team.
Oh the things you’ll dare to do when you’re in a summer job and don’t need references.