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Use Bullet Points Consistently

Bullet points help make information easier to scan, remember, and use. In ELT publishing, clear bullet point style supports consistency, readability, and professional presentation across lessons and training materials.

◎Aims

The aim is to make bullet points consistent, easy to read, and learner-friendly. Writers should always choose the appropriate style, whether fragments, full sentences, or sentence endings, and apply it consistently within the same lesson or product.

1Sentence Fragments (Short Phrases or Words)

Fragments of sentences = do not use punctuation.

For example, on role-play cards, lowercase letters are used to make clear the sentences are not complete.

Quality Assurance Analyst

Points to report:

highlight critical bugs in the user authentication module
address challenges in maintaining software quality
emphasize the impact of bugs on transaction security

⚠ Use the same part of speech to begin bullet points when possible.

2Complete Sentences

Complete sentence/multiple sentences = Use capital letters and full stops/question marks.

In the upcoming team meeting, be sure to address these points:

You must discuss the recent trends in our market sector. It’s crucial that we remain competitive.
You need to analyze our financial performance for the last quarter. You also need to identify areas where we exceeded our targets and where we fell short.

⚠ Use a capital letter and full stop for every bullet point that is a sentence and completes an introductory stem.

⚠ Don’t mix and match bullet point types. Remember to be consistent and use either all sentences or all fragments, but not a mixture.

⚠ Don’t have capitals on some bullet points and not others. Don’t have full stops on some bullet points on not others.

3Alternative Sentence Endings

If you have a sentence stem followed by a colon, you can use bullet points with a lowercase letter at the beginning and a full stop at the end in order to create a list of alternative endings.

It should be clear that we are providing alternative ways to end the beginning stem of the sentence. A full stop can be used to close each alternative sentence ending.

Code of Ethics

To achieve the above, we expect all employees to:

have integrity in what they do.
communicate openly and honestly.
follow all health and safety rules.
refuse to accept or offer gifts to clients.

⚠ Use the same grammatical structure and the same part of speech to begin each bullet point. In the above example, the infinitive is used for each bullet point in this list.

4Exceptions

Occasionally capital letters are used for sentence fragments. The reason for this is clarity and emphasis in specific contexts where fragments function as headings or highlight key aims or titles.

One obvious exception is Lesson Goals:

These are written in sentence fragments but always start with a capital letter.
They are not followed by a full stop.
The capital letters signal importance and align with their function as official objectives of the lesson.

Another common exception is labels or headings (e.g., Role cards, Discussion questions). Even though these are technically fragments, capitalisation is used to make them visually distinct and easy to scan.

✓Key Takeaway

Consistent: use the same style within one lesson or training product.
Clear: use consistent bullet punctuation in one list.
Practical: use capitals and full stops only when the bullets are full sentences.