Minimize Eye Sweeps with Parallelism

When all your bullets are parallel or similar in meaning (for example, a list of products, product features, or product benefits), the relationships will immediately be clear to your audience. However, whenever you create such a parallel list, pay particular attention to the grammatical form of the bullets. If you write each one in a different part of speech, you'll be forcing your audience to do extra work to grasp the logic. They'll have to reset their minds at the start of each bullet, as you do when you read the list in Figure 7.4.

Figure 7.4. Bullets in non-parallel form.

Don't make me think! Each of these bullets represents a different grammatical form. The first bullet is a complete sentence with a passive verb; the second bullet is a noun modified by a preceding adjective; the third bullet is an adjective modified by a preceding adverb; and so on. Grammatical terminology notwithstanding, you can feel the inconsistency.

This problem is akin to the "floating decimal" dilemma in accounting, in which a series of figures is printed with irregular decimal places. This makes the numbers very difficult to read and compare accurately, anathema to any bookkeeper or accountant . In bullet slides, non-parallel construction of bullets is anathema to your audience.

To solve this problem, write any set of bullets in a list in parallel (grammatically the same) form, so that the similarity and relationships of the underlying concepts is obvious, as in Figure 7.5.

Figure 7.5. The same concepts as in Figure 7.4, in grammatically parallel form.

In Figure 7.5, each of the bullets is in the same grammatical form: adjective + noun. This parallelism in both meaning and form makes it easy for your audience to see the relationships. With this organization, you can display all four bullets at once. Your audience can absorb them quickly, and then turn their attention back to you to listen as you add value.