Monday, December 29, 2008

Things I think about. Pt. II

I realize this month something that I have probably always known, but have never been able to articulate:

I hate bullet points.

Bullet points are to writing what a plain cinder block wall is to architecture: functional but an affront to style.

Ok, sure, writing is about communicating clearly, and bullet points are a fiendishly efficient way to communicate information. But they're just so damned ugly. It is not an accident, I believe, that the really great writers of history don't use bullet points.

Where would this country be today, for example, if our Founding Fathers had access to the easy Bullet Point function in MS Word?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with the following unalienable rights:
- life;
- liberty;
- the pursuit of happiness.


Not cool.

1 comment:

dogimo said...

Well, bullet points have no place in literature, that's for sure! But I believe they are appropriate for various forms of communication (business memoranda, etc) where it is assumed that your readership includes at least some morons.