Other easy reads don’t use bullet points. Maybe your poster shouldn’t, either.

Bullet points are overused on conference posters. But many people recommend them, often claiming that bulleted lists are “easier to read.”

If bullet points were truly easier to read, you should see them in publications aimed at wide readership.

Like People magazine.

Here’s the first few paragraphs of an article on the People website about Selena Gomez.

Here’s the start of an article quoting Laila Ali.

But maybe you think People is still too high brow? How about the infamously goofy tabloid, The Weekly World News?  

Here’s a recent article about bird attacks:

Huh. No bullet points there, either.

How about a magazine specifically aimed at novice readers? You know, for kids? Like Sports Illustrated Kids? If bullet points are easier, surely they would want to make their magazine accessible to kids?

From an article about their “Sportskid” of the year:

Again, you don’t really see bullet points. 

Kids magazines are kind of holdouts in mainly being in print and not online, I can’t find a current issue of Ranger Rick online, but here’s a sample of a 2016 article (the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary).

You should be expecting it by now. No bullet points to be seen.

So professionals who are genuinely trying to make things easy to read because that is their specific target audience do not use bullet points. I think we are reaching the point where we can say that “bullet points are easy to read” is a myth. Or if not a myth, not standard practice. It seems to be academics in particular who have a bullet list fixation.

I think the only reason this advice comes up so often for posters is because PowerPoint is so often used to make posters.

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