How to List Things in an Essay

• usually comes in the form of sentences or clauses. As discussed, use a colon to signify appearance of the list.
• Make sure to capitalize the first letter of each item, and use the single-spaced format.
• If using numerals, write an introductory sentence for the steps in a sequence. Here the essentials on how to list things in an essay examples using numbers:

For a numerical list

To bake cookies, you will need to follow the steps bellow:

1. Assemble the necessary ingredients, such as flour, butter, salt, milk, and chocolate chips. Mix together well.
2. Preheat oven to 360 °F.
3. Grease cookie sheets.
4. Bake for 10 minutes.

• Make use of bullets to list items when order is considered unimportant. As discussed with numerals, you also need to provide a sentence to introduce the list to follow with bullets. Remember that bulleted lists must warrant the use of space, which means that you should not use bullets to list down two to four small items.

For a  bulleted list

Here’s a list of books to read this summer:

• A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin
• The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson
• The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
• The Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

• Avoid the usage of more than one bulleted list in a three-page essay. This can make your essay composition look like a prose composition instead.
• Do not use abbreviations. Under any circumstance, do not use ‘&’ as a substitute for ‘and’ , or ‘b/c’ to stand in for ‘because.’ There are, however, notations and abbreviations utilized in the conventions of professional writing. For instance, ‘e.g.’ is often used for ‘for example’ and ‘etc.’ for ‘et cetera’ and ‘p.’ for ‘page.’ The last one, however, can only be used for citations.

How to list things in an essay MLA

The Modern Language Association, or the MLA, style is the top style of documentation for literary research. The field of humanities also makes use of this in academic papers, if you’re wondering how to list things in an academic essay for humanities. The MLA follows a specific set of rules for manuscripts, and is considered as a standardized reference format in college, along with the APA style. The MLA style focuses on the citation of literary works, books, anthology, multimedia, audio-visual material, and other similar works.

If you’re wondering how to list things in an essay in MLA, it’s unlike the process of how to list things in APA. One distinct difference between the two is that present tense of verbs is preferred in the MLA style. The MLA citing is formatted like this:

Author’s Last name, First name. “Title of Source.” Title of Container, other contributors, version, numbers, publisher, publication date, location.

So, if you’re looking to list things, such as sources, using the MLA citation, make sure to follow the format given.

Lists come in handy, especially when it’s necessary to juxtapose from solid walls of words. As mentioned earlier, this tires readers out and makes it hard for them to retain information. As with all writing processes, though, the process on how to list things in an essay comes with guidelines that must be followed. As soon as you’ve mastered this, however, expect your essays to be more effective and impactful.