"I think these items on this page should be in a list." "Okay." "A list with bullets on the side." "All right." "The first line is this, and it is over just a little. Then this is the next line, lined up with the first one. <he pauses and looks at me until I nod> Then this is the last one on the list, lined up with the others." "..." "Do you see what I'm talking about? It needs to be a list." "Yes, make it a list. About these other changes..."
<five minutes later>
"Don't forget that one document. Make that paragraph a list instead. With bullets on the side." "Okay." "Are you just agreeing to get rid of me?" "Yes."
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Indent and hand-draw cute little starry bullets on the page.
Ask your boss constantly if he can make the next bullet for you.
Hit the "bulleted list" button up on the Word control pane.
The third is the least fun way to do it, and I would suggest one of the first two. I guarantee your document has at least a 50% increase in impression level if you do it the first way. Posts: 1170 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
how far back you need to stand also depends on what the list is stapled to, if it is an intern then you may want to be further back to avoid getting messy.
oh, and instead of drawing the little starry bullets you could draw smilie faces, or pentagrams, those would also make an impression I think.
Posts: 2332 | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
Perhaps you should just make a normal list and then walk into your supervisor holding the list and crying your eyes about how you just couldn't conquer the difficult task he'd assigned you.
Tried to make a three-level list, but it barfed on the code. And I don't know where that phantom list item is coming from. Hmm.
Posts: 1805 | Registered: Jun 1999
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posted
Did you know bullets in printing got their name because actual bullets were originally used to cast the lead type used to create them in a printing press? The shape made it easy to center the dot on the lead blank.
Dagonee * That's not true, but I bet I could get people to believe it. Has anyone here ever played the game Malarky?
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
I'd like to point out that, thus far, kat has not proved that she can in fact make a bullet list. Perhaps this guy knew what he was talking about.
Posts: 4625 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Wow, Dag. That's almost as believable as the "Commas and periods used to fall off the printing press, and that's why they go inside quotation marks" myth. You should start a chain email or something.
Posts: 586 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
Have we ever figured out why, in America, we do that? Every explanation I've seen in all my searches has had to do with the fact that those symbols were more delicate and were more likely to be damaged. Why is that so unbelievable?
There must be some good reason why we defy logic for convention.
Posts: 270 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
If it were highly believable, it wouldn't be a testament to my powers of persuasion to say I could get someone to believe it, now would it? Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Have we ever figured out why, in America, we do that? Every explanation I've seen in all my searches has had to do with the fact that those symbols were more delicate and were more likely to be damaged. Why is that so unbelievable?
It couldn't be due to their size, or their would be similar problems with i's, apostrophes, and exclamation marks, not to mention the quotation marks themselves. Plus, there's no special convention for periods and commas used elsewhere. Why would a comma between words be immune, but not a comma at the end of a quotation? Why would colons, semicolons, and exclamation marks be exempt?
Typographical characters were small metal blocks that were packed together with no space in between them. How exactly would they bend or break, and how would putting them somewhere else prevent it? Personally, I'd guess that it's a purely aesthetic convention.
quote:Personally, I'd guess that it's a purely aesthetic convention.
But see, the fact that the theory I stated is pretty universally accepted and the observance that there's nothing any more aesthetically pleasing about the inside-the-quotations periods and commas lead me to believe that we don't know very much at all about the first printing presses, and that it truly was a problem. Maybe "X." was more stable than "X".
Why would we bother making a universal rule if that weren't true? I think the most aesthetically pleasing place for punctuation is where it belongs.
And the fact that not even Snopes has debunked the theory makes me believe it's true. Posts: 270 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Universally accepted? I've seen just as much "universal acceptance" of the ridiculous old theory that the 's on possessives came from a contraction of his. And of what "observance" of aesthetics do you speak?
Quotation marks weren't even used with the first printing presses, anyway. They were invented in the seventeenth century. And it's not like nobody knows how early printing presses worked.
I can't see anything inherently more "stable" about tucking commas and periods inside, especially considering the fact that colons and semicolons didn't get tucked inside. The characters in a line of print are like bricks—they're all the same height (though not all the same width), and they fit snugly together. It's not like a narrow brick in a wall is going to break or something.
And the fact that there are so many variations of your explanation—the characters break or bend, they fall off the end of the line, they get knocked out of alignment, and so on—has "myth" written all over it.
If there's one universal rule about punctuation, it's that personal taste and aesthetics reign supreme.
posted
From a telephone conversation today with the same person:
"The pages on the web site have a yellow background, but when you open the pdf document, it looks like a pdf document." "That's because it is a pdf document." "Do we want it to look like a pdf document?" "Can't really get around that as long as it is a pdf document." "I know that. But do we want it to look like it?"
posted
kat... that gives me flashbacks. I've had whole conversations consisting of those very things and variants.
Bah! Round and round we go. Where the technobabble stops nobody knows. But, someone will get hurt if it lands on me that's for sure.
Posts: 822 | Registered: Jul 2001
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And I don't know where that phantom list item is coming from. Hmm.
