Lists
To produce a professional-looking document, you need to decide on a style for lists and use it consistently. Factors to consider are:
- punctuation to introduce the list (colon or none)
- punctuation at the end of each item (none (as here), comma, semi-colon or full stop)
- whether to capitalise the first letter of each item
- spacing between items
- whether to use bullets or identifiers.
Some examples follow.
Format 1: A simple list:
- introduced by a colon
- indented
- bullet symbol in front of each item
- single line space between items
Format 2: A more elaborate format, with the following characteristics:
(a) each item is identified by a lower-case letter with a round bracket before and after it
(b) there is one line space between the items
(c) because the items are all part of one sentence, there is no need for initial capitals, and the only punctuation necessary is normally a full stop after the last item.
Format 3: Lower case roman numerals are used instead of lower case letters in two situations:
(a) when one of the items in a Format 2 list itself contains a list:
- (i) this is an item within (a)
- (ii) and this is another
(b) when two separate lists appear in the same section (cross-references would be confusing if there were two items both labelled ‘(a)’).
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