This is something most people have to look up. Which of the examples is correct?

Example A

Several recent incidents have caused concern on the part of Management:

  • unauthorized science experiments in the staff room
  • employees pointing and laughing at rude or annoying customers
  • conspicuous tap dancing in the main dining room

Example B

Several recent incidents have caused concern on the part of Management, including

  • unauthorized science experiments in the staff room;
  • employees pointing and laughing at rude or annoying customers; and
  • conspicuous tap dancing in the main dining room.

Example C

Several recent incidents that have caused concern on the part of Management are:

  • unauthorized science experiments in the staff room
  • employees pointing and laughing at rude or annoying customers
  • conspicuous tap dancing in the main dining room.

Writers can get quite agitated about this sort of thing, and pencils —let’s admit it—have occasionally been thrown.

Actually, they’re all right. Let’s look at the differences.

Example A follows the rules set out by the grande dame of North American style guides, the Chicago Manual of Style. Note that there is no final punctuation: the sentence closes at the end of the last bullet, or before the next upper-case letter. Chicago is keen on having a main clause (a chunk of words that could stand together as an independent sentence) before the colon.

Example B follows APA style (the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association): no introductory colon, no main clause to introduce the list, semicolons following list items, and an “and” before the last bullet.

Example C follows the New Oxford Style Manual. Like APA, it allows an incomplete sentence to introduce the list, but, like Chicago, it does use a colon. Like APA, it concludes the sentence with a period; like Chicago, it drops the punctuation at the end of the list items and the “and” before the last bullet.

It’s a little scary to venture an opinion on this one, given the ferocity of opinions on bulleted lists.

It can even be hard to know how to look them up in an index—sometimes they’re called “bullet lists,” sometimes “vertical lists.” The key feature of a bulleted list, though, is that it presents information through layout, through its arrangement on the page, rather than in an ordinary (run-in) sentence.

In a traditional sentence you need to have punctuation after each list item, so that the reader will know where one stops and the next one begins. When you arrange the list vertically, the reader already knows that. So why would you put the punctuation at the end of the line item, à la APA? Overkill. (Especially semicolons: they are a heavy punctuation mark.) (And what’s the “and” for? You can see there’s another one coming.) It’s like when people quote something in the middle of a paragraph: they indent it from the left margin, and then they use quotation marks, and then they decide to put the whole thing in italics just in case, and then, what the hey, how about bold…STOP already!

It’s true, I am biased in favour of less punctuation. If it’s not necessary, let’s lighten things up a little. I can see why some people get nervous about not having a period at the end, but whose good idea would it be to keep a sentence going after the bulleted list? That’s right, no one’s.

Some people just don’t like bulleted lists, but they’re a useful way of helping readers to grasp information easily. Pick your style and go. Now: fancy bullets or the little solid circles? Nah, we’re not going there.