The day the police lost control

If ever a manager of a public organisation finds him- or herself wondering whether it's worth hiring a proofreader or copy editor, the following rather important press release should be proof enough...

"On 18th April 1989, 96 of the Liverpool fans went to Hillsborough to watch the FA Cup Semi Final and died as a result of the disaster. On that day South Yorkshire Police failed the victims and families. The police lost control. In the immediate aftermath senior officers sought to change the record of events. Disgraceful lies were told which blamed the Liverpool fans for the disaster.

Statements were altered which sought to minimise police blame. These actions have caused untold pain and distress for over 23 years. I am profoundly sorry for the way the force failed on 15th April 1989 and I am doubly sorry for the injustice that followed and I apologise to the families of the 96 and Liverpool fans. South Yorkshire Police is a very different place in 2012 from what it was 23 years ago and we will be fully open and transparent in helping to find answers to the questions posed by the Panel today."

Ooops.

I get the point

Bullet points have a lot going for them. I, for one, am a big fan of bullets. They are:

 

• a useful way to summarise information
• an eye-catching way of breaking up long bits of text
• they shouldn't depart from the stem of the sentence, like so

 

Like much else, bullet points are very handy but need to be used correctly. I recently sat through a presentation by an officer from a certain department of a certain local council. The presenter gave us a handout containing a copy of the slides, which is always a good idea but left me with a record of a set of bullet points in which almost everything that could go wrong did. I reproduce it in full here:

 

Service Reform – Re-structure

 

North West Area Services will be responsible for:

 

• Developing and delivering programmed activities to meet local need (Play, Youth, Adult Learning)
• Community Capacity Building
• Operational Management of all Community Facilities
• Operational Management of Community Libraries
• Lead on the integrated planning process for local service delivery across the company.
• Lead the introduction of the Strategic Learning Partnerships with Education Services.

 

We'll begin at the top: there's no need to put headings in title case (that is, with the first letter of every main word in caps). Sentence case (that is, with just the first letter of the first word capped, and of course any other proper nouns) is, to my eye at least, much more attractive. It's also much easier to distinguish proper nouns from common nouns and other words, so much easier to read.

 

This seems to be partly a British/American distinction, though for some reason Sky News Have All Their Headlines In Start Case Like So (even including articles, conjunctions and prepositions like 'all' and 'in'). Compare this to the Economist's sentence case, for instance. I find the latter much more elegant.

 

Next, 'Re-structure' probably hasn't had a hyphen since the days of Northcote and Trevelyan.

 

In 'Developing and delivering' etc, I'm not sure 'programmed' aids our understanding very much, but other than that it's not too bad. Again, though, I would suggest that the categories 'Play', 'Youth' and so on need not be capped. In this case they might refer to sub-departments rather than abstract concepts, but we aren't to know that. Either way, unless you're a German bureaucrat, you should refrain from capping ordinary nouns.

 

At 'Community Capacity Building', things start to fall apart. I don't know what this phrase means, or why it's in caps. The next two bullets could probably be condensed into 'managing libraries and other facilities'.

 

Our presenter has saved the classic bulleting mistake for the end: with the two points beginning 'Lead' it becomes clear that she's forgotten how the sentence began. You wouldn't write 'North West Area Services will be responsible for lead on the integrated planning process for...' — unless, for some reason, you were talking about lead, and NWAS really were to be responsible for its presence — so you can see that what the presenter has done here makes no sense.

 

(Then there's the jargon-heavy text itself: is it too much to take for granted that planning processes will be integrated, that partnerships will involve strategy and that management will operate?)

 

It's quite simple to get these right: you just have to pretend that the intervening bullets don't exist, and treat each point as a continuation of the original sentence. Then read each one on its own to check whether it makes sense. In my experience, bulleted lists very often break down in this way after the first three or four points. Perhaps, for that reason, it's a good idea not to overdo it and try to stuff too many points into one list. Putting whole paragraphs into single points can also look like cheating.

 

Note that the last two points also include full stops, while the others don't. This is fine if the point is a coherent, discrete sentence in its own right (which in this case is ruled out by the stem). If so, it should have a full stop and begin with a capital letter, like any other sentence. If it's a phrase rather than a sentence, or an item on a list (like the first four points in our example), it shouldn't have a full stop and needn't begin with a capital.

Another trick for making your list less verbose is to make sure any words that would be repeated at the start of each point are instead put in the stem. So instead of:

'NWAS will:

• lead on libraries
• lead on other unspecified community facilities
• lead on confusing presentations'

we would have:

'NWAS will lead on:

• libraries
• other unspecified community facilities
• confusing presentations'

My final bit of advice on bullets is to consider whether a numbered list might be better, for instance if you need to make it clear that a set of instructions should be followed in a particular order. For all their virtues, bullets can sometimes cause ambiguity on that point.