ClearTips: Riveting reports

Lead with the point and follow it with a bulleted list

A list of numerical facts, complicated details, or recommendations can be difficult for readers to lift off the page from a block of text. Breaking that block into bulleted items clarifies those elements, a style good for setting up a line of argument.

The ratio of global trade to GDP has been rising over the past decade, but it has been falling for 44 developing countries, with more than a billion people. The least developed countries, with 10% of the world's people, have only 0.3% of world trade-half their share of two decades ago.

The list goes on:

• More than half of all developing countries have been bypassed by foreign direct investment, two-thirds of which has gone to only eight developing countries.
• Real commodity prices in the 1990s were 45% lower than those in the 1980s—and 10% lower than the lowest level during the Great Depression, reached in 1932.
• The terms of trade for the least developed countries have declined a cumulative 50% over the past 25 years.
• Average tariffs on industry country imports from the least developed countries are 30% higher than the global average.
• Developing countries lose about $60 billion a year from agricultural subsidies and barriers to textile exports in industrial nations.

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