The Bullet Pointing of America...

Dr. Dugmore said (quote): “I think we’re now in a bullet-point society. We’re not a paragraph society or a conversation society. I think we’re used to reading bullet-points, we’re used to speaking in bullet-points – and we’re losing out on human interaction.” Bullet-points are, of course, those terse facts, bluntly listed, with a big, black dot in front of each. Although useful on web pages or in memos, bullet-points are probably a symptom of disconnection – each fact being disconnected from its adjacent facts, and all of these isolated facts lacking a human face. Bullet-points make no attempt at showing logical or human connections. Perhaps Dr Dugmore is right – perhaps we are now verbal machine guns spraying bullet-points at each other: perhaps we have become a bullet-point society.

To the above I cry horse pucky. Here is why (in bullet points, of course):

Just like a baseball pitcher, its all in the delivery. it will make the person communicating a better writer because they will want to emote a certain feel for an email, PowerPoint, etc.

When I am sending messages I want to get to the point. No one has enough time in the day. When I am sitting in a meeting and an associate is standing on his/her proverbial soapbox going off on some diatribe about something that could be summed up in 10 words.

What Dr. Dugmore should be addressing in the above is "diarrhea of the mouth syndrome". Business is full of egos, the challenge is managing said egos.

Brevity- Treat every correspondence like you are on a Blackberry with a tiny keyboard. Blackberry's were not created for those looking to type a manifesto.

Directness: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.