ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

all otm.

Think of it like "You will be insulted by our products!" vs "You will be insulted at our products!"

so in my job there's a lot of bulleted lists. research has shown people like them. as a result, there are a lot of interrogatives used, i wondered what people think about this kind of usage.

so an example would be:

people using interrogatives:

* which look weird to me at the start of bullets

people seem to use them to describe:

* what someone reading the page has to do
* which ways of doing it they can choose

i always want to change the last example to "the things someone reading the page has to do", "the ways of doing it they can choose"

am i on any grammatical ground here? it seems beyond instinct, i just think unnecessary interrogatives look really weird. especially "what", and especially when they begin a bullet.

I agree this reads somewhat inelegantly but idk if there's a grammatical basis to overrule it. Perhaps you could argue that a pronoun without an antecedent is unclear and only valid for direct questions, not these sort of indirect ones, so they should either be reworded as direct questions, making their clumsiness more obvious, or as you suggest

our house style for this changed recently to remove the :
which meant a lot of 'you need to do the following
* thing one, which is a complete sentence but no full stop allowed
* thing two.

In your example i think 'what' and 'which' are probably more 'plain english'?? but your suggestions are correcter.

btw I meant to say that I think 'the following' before a bulleted list should have a colon, but what do I know

nb our house style only recently removed the - from web-site

Bulleted lists are the scourge of the grammar fiend. Months of my life gone to misery over them.

ah interesting - one of my colleagues hates "the following" - i guess it's close to talking about spatial parts of the page which obviously excludes some users, but i still think it has its uses. we use bulleted lists all the time - i find it strange the colon would be removed.

our style is to never use full stops at the end of bullets. we have a bulleted list for like more variable lists of things and generally to create more white space and break up big paragraphs, but we also use numbered lists for tasks which can be broken down into a list of things you should do in a given order.

our style doesn't allow us to make the bullets questions either.

I can abide bulleted lists where each element is a sentence fragment, and therefore lacks end punctuation. For example, I have fucked the following people:

- Your mom
- Your sister
- Your other sister

I am also cool with bulleted lists in which each element is a complete sentence, punctuated accordingly. For example, my sexual career includes the following conquests:

- I had sex with your mom in a gondola.
- Your sister went down on me in a movie theater.
- Your other sister allowed me various improprieties in an opera house.

HATE HATE HATE any bulleted list that tries to format itself as a deconstructed sentence, e.g., these are some of my conquests:

- Your mom,
- Your sister, and
- Your other sister.

Yeah the third option is madness. The first two are fine.

We try to avoid repeating the first word in each bullet, but it's a subject of debate I think.

this might be the right place to admit that my ilx posts are always half-done snatched moments of awful typos and errors, yet all day i spend my time feverishly discussing a word or a sentence while pointing at big screens. i think it's some kind of subconscious disease that i keep posting horrible wrong things on this board.

xxp keep disrespecting my family and the only list of bullets you'll be interested in is:

- http://i.imgur.com/9uLzEho.png

Heh. Agreed with LocalGarda on both counts; I apologize for the your/your/your, which I admit makes it a poor example.

My main point is that end punctuation depends on whether the bulleted material is or is not a sentence.

The tricky bit is treating mixed lists, where some items are sentences (or include multiple sentences) and some are not. Typically I recommend rewriting to make bullets parallel, but when this is not possible we "promote" fragments to sentences if ANY bulleted items are sentences.

our style bans end punctuation regardless.

i suspect maybe for screen readers but not sure... like would a full stop be weird when the next bullet begins as a fragment.

I don't mind banning end punctuation entirely EXCEPT when a long bullet includes more than one sentence. I wouldn't be comfortable with a list item that had a complete sentence, then another bit, but that other but didn't have something at the end.

This may never come up in your world but it comes up in mine from time to time.

we would always use dashes or whatever and generally try to write it in a way that avoided it being separate sentences. ideally the bullet wouldn't be really long but that's inevitable sometimes.

I am not a writer, as everyone who has attempted to read my ILX posts will be glad to hear, but I quite like

- thing one, and
- thing two;
- additionally, final thing three.

e.g. I was looking at some list of instructions for applying for something and there was a bulleted list to mean "you must do all of these things: one <AND> two <AND> three", and then there was a bulleted list to mean "you may need to do something else if: x <OR> y <OR> z", and then there was a third bulleted list where I couldn't work out if it was an and-list or an or-list

however, despite my confusion perhaps it was not at all confusing to normal people, as I often find ambiguities-to-me in written instructions which nobody else has ever found ambiguous

No, I think your instincts are right. Making one of/all of explicit is important.

I don't mind starting with relatives (which is what they are, I think, rather than interrogatives) - they make for complete clauses that jump off the initial colon easily enough.

i find which okay-ish but what always looks v strange to me. i know it's sort of a personal thing though.

And yeah, I work same place as Lg (different team) and I am guiltily aware of sometimes contorting to avoid two sentences in one, non-end-stopped bullet.

Xp
Yeah... thinking about it I'm sure I recently saw one of those "what you'll get"-type heads that introduced ambiguity.

haha weirdly i don't find it as annoying in headings. not necessarily. i guess i just find lots and lots of the time in the bullet scenario, instead of saying "which" or "what" you can use the specific noun you're talking about.

Totally understand that you need a lot of format muscle if you want to effectively communicate something conditional like document requirements for e.g., a passport application.

You need one of the following:
- Thing,
- Thing, or
- Thing

~ AND ~

One of the following:
- Thing,
- Thing, or
- Thing

~ OR ~

A signed affidavit stating the following:
- Thing,
- Thing, or
- Thing

In those cases, whatever you feel you need to do is probably justifiable. But in my world most of the time people are just caught up with listing stuff and they can't stop themselves. Plus someone told them a bulleted list was a good way to "break up the text."

Oddly, for centuries, people have been somehow able to read entire BOOKS that were full of nothing but paragraphs. Can you imagine?

imo, bulleted lists are somewhat analogous to earlier introductions of punctuation marks or upper and lower case letters into text. They are a visual aid to absorbing the content of text more smoothly and easily. They can, like commas, be abused, but as with commas there are gradations of accepted use which shade gradually into abuse. There's no one right rule you can apply in every case.

Ye Mad Puffin responds poorly to the 'deconstructed sentence' style of bulleted list, and therefore would seek to dissuade its use, but I would say that so long as resorting to a bulleted list allows the content to be absorbed more rapidly and completely than attempting some other presentation, then its use is justified, regardless of how grammatically heterogeneous the individual items are. I'd agree with Ye Mad Puffin to the degree that one ought to try to homogenize the elements of the list insofar as it is possible to do so without impairing its fluidity. What matters most is getting your points across.

homogenize without impairing fluidity otm

i enjoyed your initial post on the grounds of clarity, ye mad puffin

i also think you are otm about following phrase structure in a bulleted list

our editors tend to change lengthy instructive paras to bulleted lists. We often do a lot of technical or listy stuff though.

this might be the right place to admit that my ilx posts are always half-done snatched moments of awful typos and errors, yet all day i spend my time feverishly discussing a word or a sentence while pointing at big screens. i think it's some kind of subconscious disease that i keep posting horrible wrong things on this board.

― japanese mage (LocalGarda), Friday, May 20, 2016 3:21 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is my life also
we have a rule now about not spending time on MS Word formatting in meetings

xp yeah Puffin otm. Bullets work really well for screen-based, task-driven, fuck-i-just-have-to-do-this stuff (like literally passports, that's a chunk of my world), but that gets turned into "let's make a huge long list", rather than "here's what you need, arranged clearly" in the wrong hands.

and I also like being able to come here to post tangled over-compressed upside-down sentences with typos and adjectival pile-ups when I spend my days thinking "Can I make this simpler and clearer? What's my blinding move that renders this fucking thicket of legislation & over-explanation redundant and just tells someone what they have to do?"

bless you

lots of enjoyable/useful otm here. so many emails I get are basically just
- sentences broken up
- into bullets
- for no apparent reason
- or a mentality overwhelmed by powerpoint

particularly enjoyable are the ones where someone has started bulleting relatively concisely, but with the bullets gradually unspooling into long, caveated responses. if i put bullet points here my thoughts will appeared *ordered*.

Must admit that over the years my ilx style has rather more taken over my email etc protocol

Hasnt hurt a bit tbh

email and ilx style both equally atrocious tbh, part of the ongoing slide from a decade ago when i used to be meticulous about brevity and picking the right word, to now where i resemble an incontinent hippo bashing at a computer.

I wont have that said nor ungainsaid no matter how ungainly yr saying

Unfortunate headline

http://i.imgur.com/vW36Zko.jpg?1

anyone ever done much commercial copy?

i've started doing the odd bit of this as a sort of moonlighting evening thing, the money is decent and it's good for tax reasons to have more than one client besides my day job.

but it is also kinda hilarious. i'm working on the brand bible for a hotel in dubai - i came in drunk last night and the crazier the shit i put in the more they seem to like it. i wrote "a retreat for modern-minded guests that seek a rich mix of thought and action" and the client is like "love this, brilliant!"

seems like a sort of hilarious career - it feels like i'm writing false scripture or something.

I do a little of that. Always feel a little dirty afterward.

Our office has publications that report actual news, but the sales staff also sells these little supplements that are very much geared toward the advertiser. Since the real reporters can't ethically write those, and I'm not a real reporter, I get stuck with them every so often.

I wrote 750 words on how wonderful the power company is for putting colored lights on our river bridges. A few months later, there's the CEO and the mayor holding up a framed copy of my story on Facebook. Made me want to jump off one of those bridges.

lol, ugh.

yeah this is weird, it's like a global hotel brand that's starting in dubai, which is sketchy enough as it is. the client's demands are hilarious though, it's like it has to be "lively" and "in motion" and guests are meant to be "leaders" (i filled it full of "influencers/game changers/today and tomorrow's ideas wizards" and they loved it) who work hard and want a place that's connected digitally, but it also has to be a place to switch off their phones and i dunno, have sex with each other? maybe not have sex, maybe meet another tech visionary and create an app.

so contradictory.

a rich mix of thought and action

lol

a place for ppl who work hard and play hard amirite

yeah you can't imply partying too much, it's like as if it has to seem like somewhere you check in to and then invent facebook while reclining in the lobby with a vitamin water.

it sounds awful but i am kind of enjoying the utter madness of the language i can use, compared to my day-to-day frugal government plain english.

hosts understand their guests, welcoming them to the best global locations, where satisfaction, independence and choice are shared experiences.

they loved that.

I freelanced as an ad copywriter for a couple of years. The thing I learned about ad copy is that no one knows on sight what will actually work. The copy writer, the boss of the copy writer and the client all have different opinions about what is good copy and they could easily all be wrong.

I was brought in by a local agency on a job updating the menu copy for a local restaurant that specialized in German food. The owner had wangled himself onto a local television channel's morning show as their "chef" who did live cooking demos. In real life he was a foul-mouthed asshole who had nothing but contempt for his customers. He kept saying things like "just say 'rich' and 'creamy' a lot; they love shit that's rich and creamy". To be sure, my copy had a ton of "rich" and "creamy" and it was very crappy copy. He approved it. I got paid.

^^ would book

I sometimes do commercial writing as well. I really understand the dirty feeling pplains describes, but Ronan's "utter madness of the language I can use" mostly trumps the awfulness, and it can actually be fun to do.

xxp

i guess i find in my day job working for the state i have a moral sense of what i should be doing and who my audience is, and i care about it as a result of that. with this i just think there's no real end user i am worrying about.

Ha, I have thought about doing this. Always worried I would get stuck if I was trying to write copy for something I didn't actually approve of but for some reason I never actually thought about doing it drunk and letting myself get carried away.

I once saw a mockup ad for guess-which-musical leading with "Come back to the days of Nazi Germany..." with a "NO" scrawled over it.

LG, in my working world, the reader that matters is the person who signs the check (or, perhaps, the one who approves the invoice).

Of course, in an ideal situation those are people who respect my judgment about the audience, and approves of my wish to write clearly and persuasively. But I personally don't feel bad or dirty if I get paid lavishly for not-very-good work. Paid work allows me to feed and clothe and house my children, for example. It allows me to give to charity and generally participate in the economic life of my community. These are not bad or dirty or immoral things.

I agree that in pure ad copy writing, no one knows what will work. There's a famous old thing about "half the money you spend on advertising is wasted, you just don't know which half."

In my peculiar subspecialty - proposal writing - we sometimes do know what worked with a customer and what didn't. It is almost never the words. Most customers decide on price, then work backwards to justify that decision.

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