Bullet Points – Baddie or Boon for your Business Blog?

Who would’ve thunk – such ballyhoo about bullet points! It seems content writers either love or absolutely abhor those little black dots.

Representing the critics, Ken Lopez, in The Litigation Consulting Report, lists no fewer than 12 reasons bullet points are bad news, especially for trial graphics. He’d much rather see lawyers actually speaking to the jury, rather than showing them text-heavy presentations riddled with bullet points.

Jon of Presentation Advisors is equally antipathetic towards bullet points in PowerPoint presentations.  PowerPoint and Prezi, he says, aren’t text-based media, but are there to support the information coming out of a speaker’s mouth. What’s more, he gripes, when we use bullets, we tend to lump ideas together on the same slide without giving any one of those ideas a chance to shine.

As a business blogger, I’m kind of partial to bullet points, and from what I’ve been told, Google and the other search engines like them, too.  Online searchers who’ve found our blog posts, remember, aren’t getting the information out of our mouths – we have only our written words, with perhaps some charts or pictures, to engage their attention.

That lists and bullet points are generally a good fit for blogs is something I actually stress in corporate blogging training sessions.  What I’ve found over the years is that lists help keep readers – and writers – on track.

Susan Gunelius (“20 Ideas for Writing a Blog Post”) apparently agrees. She suggests starting with a number, then taking it from there, with. Top 10 lists, 5 things not to do, 3 reasons I love something, etc.

Interesting that in just the past two weeks, there’s been a lot of press about David Letterman’s plans to retire. Letterman’s Top Ten Lists were such an effective way of organizing content that, when the talk show host first moved to CBS, NBC unsuccessfully tried to claim ownership of the idea.

Like anything else, of course, bullet points can be both poorly used and over-used. Using parallelism is a good rule, beginning each bullet point with the same part of speech and using the same grammatical form throughout.

Writers.stackexchange.com has some wisdom to add: “Bullet points are visually attractive and make it easy for a reader to locate important information. Nevertheless, try to use them sparingly: too many bullet-pointed sections in the same document will mean that their impact is lost.”

Love ’em or hate ’em, those little back dots have their uses in blogging for business!