If the initial letter of your list item is a complete phrase, uppercase it. If your list item isn't a complete phrase, you can select whether to uppercase the initial letter—this is a personal preference. Either way, your list will look nice and neat.
Always capitalize the initial letter in professional writing or when each item in a bulleted list is its own phrase. For example, my first statement is a phrase in and of itself. My second statement is also a separate phrase. Etc.
Capitalize the initial letter of bullet lists in business writing. Unless you use the "vertical lists punctuated as a sentence" arrangement with semicolons, all style guides agree that the initial letter of the bullet list should be capitalized. My second statement is a separate word or phrase.
When you create a vertical list of items by indenting one or more spaces at the beginning of each new line, such as this one for our grocery list, no capitalization is necessary. The use of a vertical list indicates that these are items that can be added to a list easily and separately. Because they are simple phrases, no capitalization is needed.
Bulleted lists used in academic writing are different from those used in business writing. When creating a bulleted list as an assignment in an academic setting, it is appropriate to capitalize each item. This shows that each item in the list has equal weight and should not be taken lightly. While creating a list of books you want to read for school, for example, it is acceptable to leave out the capitalization since they are words rather than sentences.
In conclusion, capitalizing the initial letter of a bulleted list in business writing is a good idea. It makes the list stand out and be noticed by readers.
If a whole phrase precedes a list, each bullet point must begin with a capital letter. Never begin an item in such a list with a capital letter; instead, begin with a lowercase letter and conclude with a full stop, completing the phrase.
For list items that are whole sentences (Example B) or stand-alone phrases, initial capitalization is recommended (Examples C and D). Unless the list item is a complete phrase, no terminal punctuation is recommended. Numbered lists can be shown with or without a period following the number. The decision should be based on style and user preference.
Most experts advocate beginning each bulleted item with a capital letter. We're so conditioned to capitalize only proper nouns and the first word in a complete sentence that capitalizing single words and phrases almost looks improper. But the fact is, these elements deserve special treatment.
The first thing to understand is that capitals are used because they indicate a hierarchy of some kind. A list or menu of items ranked by importance or level of detail can be indicated by starting with the most important item and working down the list or menu to the least important item. Capital letters are also used in writing instructions for things like machinery or tools to show how they should be used; for example, "Cap this pipe."
Starting all sentences with capital letters was once considered appropriate behavior for written English, but it isn't now. Beginning sentences with lower-case letters is now acceptable practice, although still somewhat formal.
Bulleted lists are easy to create in Microsoft Word. When you enter text, the default setting is for subsequent paragraphs to be indented by one inch. This is called "tight" formatting and means that no additional space is included between lines of text in successive paragraphs. To add space between lines of text in a paragraph, you need to include a margin of some sort. There are two types of margins: internal and external.
Only the initial word of a sentence or phrase, as well as proper nouns, are capitalized with sentence-style capitalization. Both this sentence and the section's subhead employ sentence-style capitalization. Other words do not require capitalization.
To capitalization means to write anything in capital letters, especially the initial letters, as in this. Every sentence's initial word is capitalized, and to capitalize is to write in capital (or upper-case) characters.
Capitalization is used in writing to distinguish words that are important or necessary to say but don't have any other punctuation marks, such as commas or periods. For example, in a legal document your lawyer may want to inform the reader that something has been "capitalized". The term comes from the first letters of each word being written in capital letters.
Words that are not necessary to read because they appear in every sentence, such as the, a, an, the, if, then, who, when, why, what, where, which, who, Wilson, Mrs. , Mr. , etc., are called non-essential or common words. Small words are easier to confuse than large ones, so usually only the most important words need to be capitalized. All other words can be left lower-case. Sometimes only the first letter of a non-essential word is capitalized to indicate that it is a generic term for all sentences in which it appears; e.g., we write "a summary judgment is a type of judgment that can be granted by a court", but would not normally write "Summary Judgment Is...".
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