A senior
executive of a corporation once told me that she directed her associates to
write in traditional paragraph form and to avoid using bullet points since they
do not know how to use them. She was right about her staff composing illogical,
unclear, inconsistent, or wordy bullet points; however, she was wrong in
depriving them of this useful business tool for two reasons:
- They probably would not know how to write effective paragraphs if they do not know how to use bullet points.
- They can use bullet points to highlight key ideas for their readers.
PARAGRAPH VERSION (55 words)
We are deferring
our decision to terminate the consultant’s contract for three reasons. First, the
new XYZ contract requires her technical skills, which no one in our team has. Also,
she has deep experience in working with XYZ. In addition, we will be
short-staffed when the XYZ contract begins in July because of vacation
schedules.
BULLETED VERSION (25 words)
We are deferring
our decision to terminate the consultant’s contract for three reasons:
·
unmatched
technical skills
·
deep XYZ
experience
·
complete
July availability
You might
argue that the bulleted version omitted important detail from the paragraph
version (i.e., the consultant’s technical skills are unmatched only on our
team, and many of our staff will be on vacation in July). I would have no
argument with this point. Nevertheless, the key information is easy to capture
in the bullet list, and the bulleted word count is less than half that of the
paragraph.
The point
to remember here is that when you catch yourself using a bunch of words like and, also,
in addition, and finally, you probably have an opportunity to list ideas, which will
help them stand out. So list those ands.
