About Bullet Points
When do bullet points help?
Bullets work when the content is genuinely a list: parallel items of similar weight, in no particular order or in an order the reader needs to see. Steps, options, requirements, criteria.
They stop working when they are used to break up prose that is actually an argument. An argument has connective tissue, and bullets remove exactly that, leaving the reader to reconstruct why one point follows another.
The honest test is whether the items could be reordered without loss. If they could not, the content is a sequence of reasoning and belongs in paragraphs.
The opposite failure is worth naming too. Content converted wholesale into bullets loses the reasoning that made it worth reading, and reads as thin however tidy it looks.
What makes a good bullet list
- Parallel grammar: every item starts the same way, whether that is a verb, a noun or a claim.
- Similar length, since one long item among short ones reads as a mistake.
- Between three and seven items; longer lists stop being scannable.
- Items that stand alone, without depending on the one above.
- An introductory line saying what the list contains.
- Enough detail per item to be useful, rather than two words that need explaining.
Common mistakes
- Bulleting an argument, which strips out the reasoning that connected it.
- Mixed grammar, where some items are verbs and others are nouns.
- Lists of twenty items, which are read as a wall rather than scanned.
- Single-word bullets that carry no information.
- A page made almost entirely of bullets, which signals nobody wanted to write the connective sentences.
Where a bullet point generator helps, and where it does not
It is good at extracting the list hiding inside a paragraph, and at enforcing parallel structure across items, which is fiddly to do by hand.
It cannot judge whether the content should be a list at all, and it will happily convert an argument into bullets if you ask, which is the main way this tool gets misused.
Check the result reads as parallel items rather than as a dismembered paragraph.
Using the bullet point generator
Enter your text and the tool returns it as bullet points. Passages that are genuinely enumerable produce far better results than passages that are reasoning.
Then check the grammar is parallel, the items are of comparable weight, and that nothing essential was lost with the connecting sentences.
Where to go next