Using hyphen points
I read that bullet points have to be consistent when it comes to content and punctuation. For example, you can't mix full sentence bullet points with fragments. Is this true for hyphen points (if there is something called hyphen points)? I'm trying to write a list of shipping instructions for a friend's small online business and not sure if the below makes sense.
-Invoice must be included in the package.
-Ship via standard shipping.
(Or if I want write free shipping)
-Ship via free shipping.
Or
-Free shipping on orders over $25.
I'm not sure id I'm punctuating the sentences above correctly, because they seem unrelated to each other and I'm mixing a full sentence with fragments.
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When you have "bullet points," the character you use for the bullet is irrelevant. If you can't mix full sentences and fragments with bullets, you can't mix them with "hyphen points" either. So the same rules apply.
• Free shipping on orders over $25
is the same as
~ Free shipping on orders over $25
There's no difference in regards to punctuation or sentence structure. (to my amusement, SE keeps changing all my various characters to bullets...)
The only time the bullet character is relevant is if you have a stacked list and you want to match outline indentation levels (all the first level lines have a bullet, all the second level lines have an open circle, and so on).
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Yes, you should try to be consistent. It is very distracting if you have bullet points with wildly inconsistent text. This looks silly:
Include an invoice with the package.
Free shipping;
Have you checked that all items for this order are carefully packed?
Label,
Make them similar in length, punctuation, and tone. For example:
Invoice
Promotional flyers
Size 3 box
Free shipping
Keep punctuation consistent. You can end each bullet point with no punctuation, with a period, with a semi-colon, etc, but make them all the same. Don't end one with a period, two with semi-colons, and three with no punctuation.
If you find that some bullet points are not clear if you don't give a full sentence of explanation, then turn the rest into full sentences. You can often do this just by adding a word like "use" or "do" if there's no obvious more-specific word.
Avoid dramatically different lengths. When four bullets points are two or three words and one is a paragraph, it looks distinctly odd.
But if you're really struggling, don't kill yourself over it. If you have two or three words for each bullet point, and one of them happens to be a complete sentence while the rest are not, like "Include invoice" versus "Free shipping", I wouldn't go out of my way to figure out how to re-word that one to make it NOT a complete sentence.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/8375. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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