| By :
Steve Shaw
Recently I surveyed a community of online readers and asked them what were some qualities of an outstanding online article submission. They mentioned some elements that I was not surprised by: Outstanding content has a great title and offers information that is practical and teaches something. Yes, that was expected, but there was one idea that kept resurfacing that I did not anticipate: Outstanding content contains bullet points or some other type of number list element. Some people surveyed even said that they would not read the article if it did not contain a bulleted list. Some pretty strong feelings in favor of bulleted lists, eh? It’s adequate inspiration to use bullet points in more articles! Why do readers like to see an online article with bulleted lists? *Online readers are in a rush. *Online readers have many distractions competing for their attention. *Online readers are reading off of a computer monitor, which makes it harder on the eyes. Online content presents unique challenges that print content does not. When you are writing articles for the web, you must write in a way that caters to the situation of your readers. Bullet Point Guidelines You can use bullet points to: *Bring attention to important information in your article *Highlight items in a list Here are some tips for appropriately incorporating bullet points in your articles: --Bullet points should highlight a brief piece of information, rather than a long passage. --Bullet points should be on the same topic. --Items in your bulleted list can either be complete sentences or sentence fragments. If the items in your list are fragments, try to start the phrase with the verb (as in the second bulleted list in this article). Using Punctuation In A Bulleted List If your list consists of items that are complete sentences (such as in the second bulleted list in this article), you would end each item with a period or other appropriate ending punctuation. List items that are just phrases should not receive punctuation at the end (as in the first bulleted list in this article). Do not end your list items with a semicolon or comma. Try to keep all of your bullet items of the same type--either all complete sentences or all sentence fragments. Ways To Indicate Bullets In An Online Article Submission: When you are submitting articles online, most publishers will require the article be in text format. Below are some acceptable ways of indicating bullets in text format: *Probably the most popular is the asterisk *. *You can also use a double hyphen -- . *An arrow can also indicate a list item. You can create an arrow by pressing the equals key and then the “greater than” key on your keyboard =>. *Sometimes people use other common keyboard keys, such as the # and the >> . Your Homework: One very easy way to improve your online article submissions is to format them so that they are easier to read. Bullet points are particularly effective at this. This week, use the guidelines in this article to incorporate bullet points in your next article.
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