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Subject:Re: Bulleted text From:Steve Pendleton <SPendlet -at- COGNEX -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 22 Jun 1998 13:29:07 -0700
>And I'm even more surprised at how many people prefer not to indent
their bullets. It seems so unnatural to me.
The diversity in design reflects a diversity in purpose.
Indented bullets are OK for brief documents such as
marketing fluff, memos, and so on. And they're OK
for book-length documents that are structurally simple.
When typesetting a novel or textbook, for example,
you typically don't encounter complex lists, so you can
afford to waste the indent.
But most people on here instead work with long,
structured, hierarchical documents. Especially in
books aimed at programmers--which are almost always
list-intensive--the writer can add value by using indentation
to reflect the logical hierarchy. Readers often jump into
these kinds of books briefly and randomly, so packing in
structural clues helps them navigate. Due to the indenting
conventions common in code, programmers and engineers
expect indenting to have meaning. Don't disappoint this
useful expectation.
So the answer is: it depends--but for most technical writing
tasks, there's no reason to indent bulleted lists.
