How to punctuate lists

I write lists daily, scribbled in a lined notepad with a biro, using little-to-no punctuation. But when your list is going to appear in print, you need to pay a bit more attention to detail.

How should one punctuate a list? Full points or no full points? Below is a brief overview, in the form of a list, naturally. By the way, it’s common for the introductory sentence to end with a colon, but not compulsory. It could also end with a full point, like so.

- If the list consists of full sentences, they tend to start with upper case letters and end in full points.

- If the list items are fragments of a sentence, they tend to be lower case and without any punctuation at the end.

- The final item may or may not have a full point depending on style (that old chestnut).

I hope that was helpful. Now I can cross “write blog post about lists” off my list.