How to Write Powerful Bullet Points

Any writer who’s spent time in the trenches publishing articles online knows it’s hard to keep a reader’s attention. In fact, according to Tony Haile’s 2014 article on Time.com, 55 percent of readers will spend fifteen seconds or less actively on a page reading the article that took you many times longer to write and carefully proofread. Like it or not, our online culture, which blasts us with a never-ending stream of content 24/7, has made us skimmers rather than deep readers.

What’s a content creator to do? You could keep your content short, but there’s evidence that longer pieces get more social engagement and links. The key to writing articles that hold a reader’s attention is not to make them shorter but to make them more readable, and doing so requires expert organization that calls attention to key topics. There’s arguably no more useful organizational tool than the venerable bullet point.

How to write powerful bullet points

According to Copyblogger, “the essence of a great bullet is brevity + promise.” By using bullets, you’re demonstrating that you know how to be concise and cut to the chase. Then, you must deliver on that promise by making every point essential and impactful. Let’s demonstrate the power of bullet points with a list of tips for writing awesome ones:

• Think of a bullet point as a mini headline. It needs to be concise and attention-grabbing in a way that intrigues readers and compels them to read more.
• Highlight elements key to understanding the content of your article. There’s no room for fluff here, so call out what’s most important.
• Keep it simple. Avoid complex outlines and don’t use sub-bullets if you can help it.
• Keep bullets thematically related. Bullet points highlight key elements of very specific topics, so stay on a single track.
• Make your bullet points symmetrical . . . just like the ones here. Notice how each point begins with a bolded directive and ends with a one-sentence explanation.
• Work in keywords. Search engines tend to give bulleted lists a little more weight.
• Don’t overdo it. You want your post to look like an article, not a grocery list.

What is a fascination?

A fascination is a copywriting technique for creating points that make your readers so intrigued (fascinated!) that they’re compelled to get more info. It’s a go-to marketing tactic you’ve no doubt seen in advertising. Let’s invent a make-believe product to show you how fascinations work.

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The Amazing Party Animal Personality Enhancer!

Use this simple device during any social event and you’re virtually guaranteed to

• develop killer dance moves
• become the most entertaining person in the room
• attract 180 percent more attention from potential love interests
• increase your notoriety in your social circles by 83 percent

via GIPHY

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Okay, so this “personality enhancer” sounds too good to be true (or suspiciously like your favorite party beverage), but the points are compelling. Who doesn’t want to become an entertaining, attractive, well-known dancing machine?

The same technique can work well when you’re trying to get readers to spend more than fifteen seconds looking at your post. If it fits the tone of your article, frontload it with bulleted items that make compelling promises. You’re telling visitors that, if they take the time to read this article, they’ll get to know more about the fascinating topics you highlighted.

Grammar basics of using bullet points

Bullet points often create confusion for writers. Do you capitalize each one? Put periods at the end? When should you use numbers instead of bullets? It turns out that making your articles easy to read through the strategic use of bullet points requires a little know-how. Here are a few guidelines.

The introductory sentence

If the text introducing your list is a complete sentence, it should end with a colon. If it’s a fragment, forget the colon and jump straight into the list.

Numbers or bullets?

If your action items need to take place in a specific order, use a numbered list rather than bullets.

EXAMPLE:

Here’s how to give your dog a bath:

1 Place a shower cap on your dog’s head.

2 Give him his rubber ducky to provide emotional security.

3 Gently bathe your dog. Avoid getting water in his big sad eyes.

You could also use a numbered list if your introductory text promises a certain number of items, like the three best reasons to bathe your dog. (But do you really need reasons?)

via GIPHY

Punctuation with bullet points

If the text of your bullet point is a complete sentence (or multiple sentences), use capital letters and punctuation. If your points are not structured as proper sentences, you don’t need to end with punctuation. Capitalization is a style choice—with sentence fragments, you can choose to start each with either upper- or lower-case letters.

The structure to use with bullet points

Don’t mix and match sentence structures. Your points should be consistent, either all sentences or all fragments.

Make sure the grammatical structure of your bullet points is parallel by starting each with the same part of speech. For instance, if you start one point with an adjective, start them all with an adjective.

CORRECT:

Adopting a dog will make you

• popular with dog lovers
• famous for having the most adorable pet on your block

INCORRECT:

Adopting a dog will make you

• popular with dog lovers
• you’ll be famous for having the most adorable pet on your block

Here’s a tip: Read each bullet point with the text that precedes it to make sure each one is parallel and makes sense as a sentence.

Using the correct example above, you would read:

“Adopting a dog will make you popular with dog lovers.”

But the incorrect example makes no sense as a sentence, so you know you need to edit:

“Adopting a dog will make you you’ll be famous for having the most adorable pet on your block.”

Keep your style consistent

Some of the bullet point style rules aren’t hard and fast. Unless you’re following a specific style guide (such as the AP Stylebook or The Chicago Manual of Style), use the style that looks best to you, but remember to keep it parallel and keep it consistent, because those things are non-negotiable. With a little precision, you’ll create bullet points that will catch your readers’ attention and keep them on the page so your carefully crafted words earn more than just fifteen seconds of their time.

Typos on Resumes: Should You Hire a Job Applicant Anyway?

Most hiring managers say they’d rule out a candidate for resume typos, but is that a good practice for your business? There are a few reasons it might not be.

Job applicants are urged to review their resumes more than a few times to ensure there are no misspellings or grammatical errors. To be safe, they should even have a friend or associate review it. But as hiring managers know all too well, even the most diligent candidates can occasionally let a typo or two slip by.

For hiring managers who review resumes, one typo can be a huge disappointment. When a candidate is otherwise perfect on paper, it can be difficult to give them a chance. However, there are a few good reasons to rethink that policy.

You’ll Have an Advantage

That candidate with the resume error? Chances are, nobody else is offering an interview. One survey found that 76 percent of executives would rule out an applicant over just one typo in a resume. With so many businesses finding competition fierce for talented professionals, forgiving a mistake or two could mean landing a great specialist ahead of competitors.

Some Candidates Hire Professionals

Some typos are simple grammatical errors that may slip by unnoticed. Some could simply be a sign that the candidate isn’t a professional resume writer. All of the other applicants may have paid a professional to create or review their resume, making them not necessarily the best candidate on their own. The best applicant may be the person who painstakingly put together a resume and reviewed it multiple times, hoping to make the best impression, yet somehow missed an error somewhere on the page.

Typos Are Relative

A typo can signal a lack of attention to detail, which may be important if you’re hiring a data analyst or CFO. However, there are many professionals who can do a great job while making an occasional mistake. Consider the type of position and whether a missing letter here or there would affect that person’s work output before sending the resume to the recycle bin.

Typos Are Human Nature

In the end, it’s more about the reason for the typo than the fact that it’s there. Psychologist Tom Stafford told Wired that when we write, we’re usually more focused on the concepts we’re conveying than the words on the page. This can lead to typos, especially when those words must serve an important purpose, such as landing a dream job. When proofing our own work, we often pay more attention to the concepts we’re communicating than the words themselves, making it easy to skim over mistakes without seeing them. This actually makes it highly likely that a document like a resume could contain an error for years without the candidate noticing. In fact, hirers could have errors on their own resumes that they’re unaware of.

Focus on the Bigger Picture

A typo may be the least of your worries. A perfectly-formatted resume may not actually be perfect once you look “under the hood.” More than half of HR professionals surveyed say they’ve caught a candidate lying on a resume, with some of those lies being complete fabrications. What’s more important—a grammar mistake, or someone embellishing a past career role? You’re probably more likely to see a candidate lying on their resume than leaving out a letter or misspelling a word. Instead of concerning yourself with resume perfection, it might be more important to focus on checking resumes and researching potential hires online.

While job applicants are encouraged to do everything they can to avoid mistakes on their resumes, it’s also important for hiring managers to know when they should completely rule an applicant out for a mistake. In some cases, they may be the ones making the mistake by missing out on a talented worker.

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A journalist and digital consultant, John Boitnott has worked at TV, print, radio and Internet companies for 20 years. He’s an advisor at StartupGrind and has written for BusinessInsider, Fortune, NBC, Fast Company, Inc., Entrepreneur and Venturebeat. You can find him on Twitter here.

Colour or Color—Which Is Correct?

• When choosing between color and colour, keep in mind that both spellings are correct.
• The shorter one, color, is the preferred spelling in the United States.
• The rest of the English-speaking world uses the longer form, colour.

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How do you spell color? You’ll see other writers do it two ways—the one we’ve already used in this sentence, and another one—colour. Neither of the spellings is wrong, and they both mean exactly the same thing. Still, the two spellings are slightly different, so there has to be something to it, right? Let’s see.

Difference Between Color and Colour

You might have noticed that there are other words with the same duality of spelling—words like “honor,” “traveling,” “favorite,” and the past tense of the verb “spell.” These variations in spelling exist because of differences between American English and British English. Color is the spelling used in the United States. Colour is used in other English-speaking countries.

The word color has its roots (unsurprisingly) in the Latin word color. It entered Middle English through the Anglo-Norman colur, which was a version of the Old French colour. The current difference in spelling between the American and British variants is credited to (or occasionally blamed on) Noah Webster, the American lexicographer. Seeking to establish American independence and identity in language, Webster implemented a number of spelling reforms in A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, which he published in 1806.

Color or Colour—Which Spelling Should You Use?

There are a couple of ways you can choose which spelling to use. You can, for example, choose the spelling that’s prevalent in the country you’re from—if you’re an American, use color. If you’re from any of the Commonwealth countries, use colour. If English is not your first language, use the spelling you were taught.

You can also choose to conform to the spelling that’s preferred by your audience. If you’re writing for Americans, use the spelling they prefer. If you’re writing something for Brits, Australians, or Canadians, use the spelling they prefer.

If you’re still not sure which to choose, or if you’re writing for an international audience, the best thing to do is choose one of the spellings and stick with it. In other words, choose consistency.

Examples of Color

The choice of Kaine is particularly glaring in light of the fact that people of color, especially African-Americans, hold the key to a Clinton victory.

The New York Times

These two types of pigment are eumelanin, which colors hair black or brown, and pheomelanin, which colors hair blonde or red.

Business Insider

Perhaps the color gray has finally found its match.

The Indianapolis Star

Examples of Colour

Out of 169 productions at this year’s festival, we could only find 14 that feature Indigenous performers and performers of colour.

CBC

The colour catches the eye.

The Telegraph

Purple was one of her favourite colours and her coffin was brought to the church in a horse drawn hearse with purple plumes on the horses.

Gloucestershire Live

5 Foundational Writers in Environmentalism

We tend to look at the world’s problems with sustainable development and environmental troubles as the burning issues of our time. The environmentalist movement has been gaining momentum for the last couple of decades, and at this point, most of us should acknowledge that the world has a problem and that we need to fix it. For those purposes, here’s a short list of influential authors who will help inspire the environmentalist in you.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Henry David Thoreau is an author who needs no introduction. With interests in society, history, biology, and politics, Thoreau would be the perfect person to discuss the challenges of today’s environmental issues. In his own time, he was a visionary whose work proved to be influential well beyond the borders of his country. The book that puts him on this list is, of course, Walden.

John Muir (1838-1914)

The Scottish-American naturalist and writer John Muir is an important early figure in the US conservationist movement. One of Muir’s most significant credits is his role in making Yosemite Valley a protected national park. As a writer, Muir produced fourteen books. His most famous book is My First Summer in the Sierra, full of contagious joy and admiration for nature and the landscape of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

Rachel Carson, a marine biologist and conservationist, was the author of Silent Spring, the book that helped ban DDT and started the movement that helped create the Environmental Protection Agency. This alone makes her one of the most significant environmental authors of the twentieth century.

Wangari Maathai (1940-2011)

Wangari Maathai was not primarily a writer; she was a Nigerian environmental and political activist and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1977, she started the Green Belt Movement, which aimed to empower women in Kenya through taking practical environmental action like planting trees and fighting against deforestation. A champion of sustainable development, democracy, and gender equality, Maathai managed to produce a sizeable body of written work, with The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience being the most famous part of it.

Michael Braungart (1958- )

Even though he’s not a prolific writer, the German chemist Michael Braungart’s work in sustainability will undoubtedly earn his small body of work a place next to other environmental classics in the future. Braungart’s primary concern is the transition from the cradle-to-grave model of industry to a cradle-to-cradle one. He co-authored his most famous written work, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, with the US architect William McDonough.