Do you know there’s an extra bit to that rhyme that makes it slightly more useful? The full one goes:
I before E. Except: after C, and in sounding like “ay”, as in neighbour and weigh.
Let’s just stop there, give ourselves a high-five, and ignore words like seize, weird and foreign, OK?
If your document is Star Wars, the bullet points are Jar Jar Binks… Because they look like they belong and they grab attention, but they’re unpredictable and sometimes completely out of control. You’ve got to know how to keep them reigned in. (I was going to use a Clint Eastwood-style opener like, “are you feeling lucky, Point?” but couldn’t follow it through – ah well…).
So why use them, you ask? Good. You’re already dubious as to their relevance. To be brief, bulleted lists are really only useful in business or technical documents, or for notes magneted to the fridge; they’ll ruin a narrative like no other thing could. If you’re listing in a narrative, please use semi-colons, and keep it brief, okay? The first nice thing about bullet-pointed lists that I must concede is their contextual practicality: depending on your bullet format you can make one point more important that the others, or make them all the same. A good example is the “darling please do” list:
Using the plain bullet keeps the relevance equal. Darling must do all the things, but it doesn’t matter in which order (the mending could probably be done while the butter’s churning, etc). Compare with a technical how-to list:
So, this stuff has to be done in the correct order or your hair will look horrible (or so society would have us women believe – ha HA!), hence the use of numbers. It’s this type of list which can really only be presented as bulleted, otherwise the directions can get too wordy and complicated: word reduction and conciseness is the second nice thing I’ll concede about bullet points. As long as the first word in each point begins with a verb (in the same form, please, and preferably the bare form: wash, condition, churn, mend…) you don’t really need many more words, and you’re allowed to forget about ones like ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘your’! It’s so rebellious! (Look at the picture – Bill Gates did that bit all wrong, shame. Even having all of the money won’t make you good at some stuff).
There are really no linguistics-based rules about punctuation in bullet-pointed lists – you can use semi-colons, full stops, full sentences, part sentences, single lines of text or many lines – but the important thing is consistency. You don’t have to start each point with a capital letter, because sometimes informality is ‘cool’ (groan), but be sure do it the same way for every one; similarly with full stops. But then if you use full stops at the end of each point you have to use a capital letter to start each new point – you see? When in doubt, do what the MS Word grammar check suggests.
Oh and another thing, don’t use CRAZY CHARACTERS in place of bullets, like hearts or arrows or pizza slices. Especially if you’re writing to me. Oh man they’re so stupid, and since bullet points are only going to be used in formal documents from now on (right? RIGHT??) they’re also unprofessional. As Pope John Paul II said*, “a good bullet in the right place will do wonders for your career”.
*I can’t back that up.
And me.
Normally I’d start with something funny in the headline. But since we’re getting into the murky waters of plural possessives, I figured it’d be better to just cut to the chase.
So, the chase, as promised, is this:
An apostrophe ‘S’ shows that something owns something else, but what happens when there’s already an ‘S’ on the end of a word? Rather than have a panic and rewrite the sentence to avoid the whole issue, read on.
Regardless of whether it’s a plural or just ends in an ‘s’, (like ‘bus’), if there’s already an ‘s’ on the end of a word, you just don’t need another one. I like to think of this as just being tidy. Add the apostrophe in to show possession, and put the spare ‘S’ back in your drawer for the next time you need to spell Mississippi or write a story about a snake.
The parents confiscated the kids’ weapons.
The bus’ wheels.
The thing is, you can put the second ‘S’ in, if it’s appropriate to the writing style, and if you pronounce it. It’s a style thing, so you choose:
Kansas’s rainstorms
Keeping up with the Jones’s
Words that are plural already
Don’t get all confused here. If it’s a plural, but there’s no ‘S’ on the end (children, media, mice), just put an apostrophe ‘S’ on the end like normal: the children’s ball, the media’s lies, the mice’s cheese.
And a final slightly unrelated note:
Days, weeks and years need apostrophes too: two days’ notice, one week’s time. Poor things. They miss out on so many of the apostrophes that are rightfully theirs.
All hopped up on a secret belief that I knew EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD, I forwarded a business contact our post on complement vs compliment - I’d noticed he’d used ‘complimentary’ to mean ‘free with purchase’, and thought he might be interested to know that he was wrong. Most people love having their mistakes pointed out, don’t they?
He was wonderfully diplomatic about it, but it turned out that I’d sent him a pretty irrelevant post (it made no mention of using complimentary in that context) AND was completely wrong. I’d always assumed that one uses complementary to mean ‘free’, because the added-value item or service completed or added to your purchase.
Cue incorrect buzzer sound.
Complimentary meaning free, comes from giving something “with compliments”, like a thank you from businesses to their customers or suppliers, which is good to know.
This episode has taught me a number of things:
1. The aforementioned complimentary usage
2. That assumptions truly are the mother of all mess ups
3. That until I’ve achieved language omniscience, I should shut my trap.
Apostrophes are something that even extremely smart people stumble over, so staying solid on apostrophe rules means I can often feel brainier than I really am.
This is the first in an “everything-I-know-about-apostrophes” series of posts. But please don’t tell all the extremely smart people, otherwise I’m going to have to find something else to boost my self esteem.
Apostrophes: the basics
Apostrophes are handy little doohickeys. They do a couple of jobs, which is why they can be so bloody confusing.
Sometimes they jump in to replace a letter in a contraction, or when you’re trying to be cool and write like a cockney: “they’re ‘andy little doo’ickeys”.
See what I did there? I contracted ‘they are’ to ‘they’re’, and replaced the H’s in ‘handy’ and ‘doohickeys’ with an apostrophe. Thanks Apostrophe – you’re like the blank piece in Scrabble, and I love you.
They are also used with an S to show possession, as in the ‘cat’s pajamas’ and ‘Mordecai’s mortgage’. Just to spell that out a bit for you – the ‘cat’s pajamas’ means the pajamas belong to the cat.
Simple enough. It’s when you get into plurals, words that end with ‘S’ and all those annoying English anomalies that the apostrophe rules start blurring, and my blog posts get interesting.
Coming up next in the series, a post on when to use its vs it’s.
(And if you’re annoyed that I used an apostrophe in the plural of H, then just sit tight – there’s a post on that coming up too.)
