Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers & Jessica Lasky-Fink

Author:Todd Rogers & Jessica Lasky-Fink [Rogers, Todd & Lasky-Fink, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

BULLETS

Bullets are extremely useful formatting tools, though they, too, suffer from mixed interpretations. They also typically do not translate well to social media or text messaging. Most of the respondents to our survey indicated that bulleted items broadly signify important content, but a substantial proportion specifically interpreted bulleted items as signaling lists that follow a hierarchy and logic. In the latter view, the words conveyed with bullets are logically connected to each other and to the phrase that preceded the bullets.

In general, readers look to the sentence preceding a bulleted list to determine whether the list itself is worth reading. If you intend the list to follow a hierarchy, that would be the logical place to tell the reader. Readers also widely recognize that subbullets—bullets that are indented and nested under higher-level bullets—are related to the higher-level bullet immediately above them. Consequently, readers may skip over the subbullets if the higher-level bullet point is not relevant to them.

The US government’s Federal Plain Language Guidelines illustrates how useful bullets can be for organizing and simplifying information, helping readers to more quickly understand key points. The guidelines show two versions of a description of Medicaid eligibility criteria as an example.[8]

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