I’m giving my most difficult client to my future mother-in-law

The hardest person to edit is yourself. People often read text they wrote as it is in their head, not how it appears on the paper. To overcome that barrier, I’ve suggested having the computer read back your text to you. That trick helps, but it doesn’t catch every mistake.

That’s what a mother-in-law is for—or, in my case, a soon-to-be mother-in-law. My fiancée’s parents were in town last weekend. We had a lovely time perusing wedding-related facilities. At one point, however, Margaret’s mom pulled me aside and said, “I’ve been reading your website.” Ut-oh. “In one post you used a semicolon where you should have used a comma.”

Now, in the long history of conversations between guys with websites and their future mothers-in-law, this exchange was an innocuous one. Nevertheless I was bothered because (to paraphrase Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby) everyone suspects himself of having mastered at least one piece of punctuation, and this is mine: I am one of the few people I have ever known that know how to use a semicolon. (And, yes, it should say “who know,” not “that know.” The mistake is Fitzgerald’s, not mine.)

Later on, when we were back at our apartment, my soon-to-be mother-in-law and I reviewed several entries on this site but, alas, could not find the incorrect semicolon. So now I have a mother-in-law who probably questions both my punctuatory prowess and ability to provide for her daughter and a website that has an erroneous semicolon.

Some guidance on bullets with help from Britney, Bridget and Brady, and Anna Nicole’s baby daddies

Do not capitalize the first letter of each bulleted item or use punctuation at the end of an entry in a list unless the introduction to the list ends with a colon or period and each entry in it is a complete and independent sentence. And if one bulleted item requires punctuation, they all do.

(For a refresher on whether a colon is required, please read my post on that subject.)

Also, unless the list is a sequence, begin each entry with a bullet, not a number.

In this example, punctuation is not needed at the end of the introduction or each entry, as the list and all of the bulleted items read like one complete sentence.

As Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, and Bridget Moynahan were the three most searched for people on Yahoo! last week, it’s a fair assumption that American culture is most interested in women who

• shave their heads and enter rehab
• die in a casino’s hotel and then have a slew of men claiming to be their baby daddy
• carry Tom Brady’s love child

Often writers want to punctuate each entry with a semicolon or comma and add “and” to the end of the penultimate item. Doing so is wrong.

Again, this advice is based on The Chicago Manual of Style. The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, for example, mandates colons (or a period) before every bulleted list, that each item in a list begins with a capital letter, and usually that each entry ends with a period.