Is it discouraged to format a list of items vertically?
In my writing, I tend to format lists of items:
The school has a vegetable garden in which the children grow cabbages, onions, potatoes, and carrots during their free time.
as actual vertical lists:
The school has a vegetable garden in which the children grow
- cabbages,
- onions,
- potatoes, and
- carrots
during their free time.
However, major document markup languages, such as HTML and Markdown, do not allow vertical content in paragraphs [1], i.e. the above text is actually internally represented as two separate paragraphs with a list in between. This, in turn, makes it difficult to style a web page to e.g. indent the first line of a paragraph without somehow extending the markup. Is this a deficiency in HTML and Markdown, or is the above use of lists rare / generally discouraged?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/34118. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
It depends on the context. In technical writing, using the list format is generally preferred. In a novel, you would always keep the list inline. In popular non-fiction you will find both styles used.
There are some markup language that will allow you to enter a list as a substructure within a paragraph.
<p>The school has a vegetable garden in which the children grow
<ul>
<li>cabbages,</li>
<li>onions,</li>
<li>potatoes, and</li>
<li>carrots</li>
</ul>
during their free time.</p>
Lightweight markup languages like Markdown, however, don't have an easy way to represent the difference between a list being inside as opposed to after a paragraph. The distinction is a sufficiently subtle one that most authors are probably not going to do it consistently anyway, so might want to avoid formatting that depends on it, or else avoid writing the paragraph in a way that puts the list in the middle. It is usually pretty easy to recast things so that the list comes at the end:
<p>The school has a vegetable garden in which
the children can spend their free time growing:
<ul>
<li>cabbages,</li>
<li>onions,</li>
<li>potatoes, and</li>
<li>carrots</li>
</ul>
</p>
And once you recast it like this, the difference between the list being in or under the paragraph becomes moot and you can just as easily do this:
<p>The school has a vegetable garden in which
the children can spend their free time growing:</p>
<ul>
<li>cabbages,</li>
<li>onions,</li>
<li>potatoes, and</li>
<li>carrots</li>
</ul>
BTW, when it comes to lists, it is common practice not to carry sentence punctuation over into the list. Think of the list as an alternate form of punctuation. Therefore you should drop the commas and the 'and'.
<p>The school has a vegetable garden in which
the children can spend their free time growing:</p>
<ul>
<li>cabbages</li>
<li>onions</li>
<li>potatoes</li>
<li>carrots</li>
</ul>
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