Lists

When to use a list

Use lists to break your content into manageable chunks and group related information together. This will make your content easier to scan.

Lists must have two or more list items. If you only have one item, write it as a sentence.

Numbered lists or bulleted lists

Use numbered lists where there is a clear order to the steps or to arrange information by importance.

If the order of your list is not important, use bullets.

Use lead-in text to introduce a list

Introduce lists with lead-in text, followed by a colon.  

Do not format lead-in text as a heading.

Lists of partial or full sentences

How to format and punctuate a list varies depending on whether list items are partial or full sentences.  

Lists of partial sentences 

Start each list item in lower case (unless it is a proper noun or title). Do not use phrases like ‘etc’ to show the list is incomplete.

Do not end list items with commas, semicolons or full stops.

Lists of full sentences

Use sentence case (start each list item with a capital letter and capitalise any proper nouns). End every list item with a full stop.

How to use links in lists

There may be situations where you need to link to other information within a list.

If you need to include a link as part of a list item, place the link after the list, rather than within it.

An exception to this rule is if the list consists only of links. In this case, you can format list items as a link.

Multilevel lists

Multilevel lists present information in a hierarchy using indented bullets. If you need to use a multilevel list, try to limit the number of levels used.

The punctuation for a multilevel list depends on whether the second level in the list is a partial or full sentence.