When Lists Appear in Academic Theses and What Can Go Wrong
Lists and bullet points appear in Malaysian postgraduate theses more often than APA guidelines recommend — in methodology chapters to enumerate procedures, in literature reviews to summarise themes, and in findings chapters to present qualitative coding categories. When lists are used, proofreading them requires attention to a set of formatting and grammatical issues that do not arise in prose paragraphs. Proofreading lists and bullet points in your thesis means checking for parallelism, completeness, and consistency — the three properties that determine whether a list is doing its job or creating confusion.
Checking Grammatical Parallelism
The most common error in thesis lists is non-parallel structure — list items that begin with different grammatical forms. A list where the first item is “Conducting semi-structured interviews,” the second is “Survey questionnaires were distributed,” and the third is “To analyse the data thematically” is non-parallel. Each item uses a different grammatical structure: a gerund, a passive sentence, and an infinitive phrase. The corrected version makes all items parallel: “Conducting semi-structured interviews,” “Distributing survey questionnaires,” and “Analysing the data thematically” — all gerund phrases.
Check every list in your thesis for parallelism. Read each item and identify its grammatical form: does it begin with a verb, a noun, a gerund, or a sentence? Once you identify the form of the first item, verify that all subsequent items follow the same form. Non-parallel lists are one of the clearest signals of unpolished writing and are easily fixed once identified.
Checking Punctuation and Capitalisation Consistency
Lists in Malaysian theses frequently have inconsistent punctuation and capitalisation across items. Some items end with a semicolon, others with a full stop, and others with no punctuation at all. Some items begin with a capital letter and others with a lowercase letter. APA 7th does not prescribe a single rigid rule for list punctuation, but whatever convention you adopt must be applied consistently across all items in a given list and, ideally, across all lists in the thesis.
A simple convention to adopt and check for: if list items are complete sentences, begin each with a capital letter and end with a full stop. If list items are phrases rather than complete sentences, begin each with a capital letter and use no end punctuation, or end each with a semicolon and the final item with a full stop. Either convention is acceptable — what is not acceptable is mixing them within the same list.
Checking That Lists Are Genuinely Necessary
Beyond formatting, proofreading lists and bullet points in your thesis includes asking whether each list is genuinely the best format for the information it presents. APA 7th discourages overuse of lists in academic writing because they fragment what could be integrated prose. A list of three or four items that flow naturally as a sentence — “data were collected through interviews, observations, and document analysis” — is better presented as prose than as three bulleted items. Reserve lists for information that is genuinely enumerable, where parallel structure adds clarity, and where the items do not have natural connective logic that prose would express more effectively.
