Bullet points

• There must be bullet points in every PowerPoint presentation

• On every text slide

• Every single one

• Why this is, I don’t know.

  • Bullet points are never seen in traditional fiction. We don’t learn about them as schoolchildren, where the outline is preferred for situating incomplete sentences on paper.

  • Because we aren’t taught to use them as children, their use in the adult world is wildly inconsistent

    • You see all kinds of things, don’t you?

      • Round bullets

      • Arrow bullets

      • Square ones

      • Bulleted items comprising single sentences, sentence fragments, single words, multiple complete sentences

      • First words capitalized, or not

      • Every word capitalized

      • Last item punctuated, or not

      • No items punctuated

      • Some items punctuated, some not (we are left to wonder why)

• They used to be called bullet points, but seldom are now

• Personally, I think all this is silly. Some downsides of using bullets …

  • There’s one big one, really — more important than any others.

  • Bullet points are hard to talk about

  • You’ve noticed this, haven’t you? Confronted with a bulleted list in a presentation, if you want to talk about a specific one, you have to count from the top to identify it, and then everyone else in the room has to count from the top to get to it.

    • This is irritating.

    • With a numbered list, you don’t have to do this.

    • Bottom line is, when it comes to lists …

      • Bullets < Numbers

    • But bullets look nicer.

• And that’s just the way it is. Defy convention at your own risk.

  • The bullet point is here to stay

  • We had better make the best of it

  • Anyway, there wouldn’t be a lot to gain were we to throw off the tyranny of the bullet point

• I guess I should say something positive about them, for the sake of balance …

  • Bullet points facilitate skimming — even better, they can be amenable to glancing: In a single line bullet point, if you call attention to a single phrase or number, you can reasonably expect your audience will only glance away from you long enough to read the highlight, and return their gaze to you without reading all of the content on the slide.

  • You are likely to print the deck anyway, aren’t you?

  • And staple or bind the stack of pages and place them in front of each member of the audience as a leave-behind. [Let’s hope they don’t leave them behind.]

  • On the printed page, bullets can be less daunting than paragraphs

    • [Note: Try not to exceed six in a bunch.]

  • They also encourage highlighting: A bullet point is considerably easier to circle than is a sentence embedded in a paragraph.

• To conclude, you’re fine to continue using bullets for everything. Just try to be consistent — use the same glyphs and line everything up properly — I’m around if you’d like help with that.

The misalignment is unsettling.