I really don’t like documents which present information as endless and often fairly meaningless bulleted lists. Generally, although they may break up the text on a page, they do not present information in a very meaningful way. We often just type the text and then arbitrarily split this into bullet points without a great deal of thought.
During the search for alternatives I came across the concept of “Words in Tables” (WiT) as described by Jon Moon in his book: “How to Make an Impact” (2008). In this book Moon looks at how to present business documents such as graphs, tables, powerpoint slides, numbers and organisation charts in a new and much clearer way.
His contention is that if we fail to present information clearly and concisely, then we will fail to get the message contained in that information across to our target audience. In my experience that is true – I have too often seen reports containing conclusions based on leaps of faith not supported by the data; or even the same data presented in several different ways just to include a nice colourful graph! This only serves to confuse and bemuse the reader.
Moon presents a wealth of ideas, tips and examples to help develop better more meaningful documents, and while at times he gets a little too mired in details such as font size, type etc, nevertheless there are some powerful ideas here which are well worth exploring.
Anyway – so what is the alternative to a bulleted list?
Well if we take a simple example such as this:
- January – first month – January is named after Janus (Ianuarius), the god of the doorway
- February – second month – February was named after the Latin term februum, which means purification
- March – third month – March comes from ancient Rome, when March was the first month of the year and named Martius after Mars, the Roman god of war
Moon suggests a better way to represent such a list is in a table like this:
Example WiT (I have put this in a PDF because it is easier to see / print)
This looks a lot better, is much more accessible in terms of understanding and is a welcome relief from yet more bullet points!
If this resonates with you, then you should have a look at the book – details on Amazon here: