In a 'bulleted' list should items that happen to be complete sentences end with a period?
1 Answer
The Wikipedia style guide mandates the following approach, which seems sensible to me given that they do have to maintain a large body of text from disparate authors.
Use the same grammatical form for all elements in a list, and do not mix the use of sentences and sentence fragments as elements.
When the elements are complete sentences, they are formatted using sentence case and a final period.
When the elements are sentence fragments, they are typically introduced by a lead fragment ending with a colon. When these elements are titles of works, they retain the original capitalization of the title. Other elements are formatted consistently in either sentence case or lower case. Each element should end with a semicolon, with a period instead for the last element. Alternatively (especially when the elements are short), no final punctuation is used at all.
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7Seems sensible, but note that this is one style guide. There are potentially as many different answers as there are style guides. Nov 19, 2010 at 12:27