Making Lists: An Essential Grammar Skill

In today’s grammar lesson, I want to show you how to make lists. I don’t mean shopping lists or to-do lists. Instead, I mean list items in a sentence for grammatical purposes. This is something that every IELTS candidate needs to be able to do for the writing test.

Here’s the lesson in video format. It’s a little different from the written lesson below but the structure is the same:

What is a List?

First of all, let’s define “list.” For grammatical purposes, it’s when we put several items together in a sentence:

• She has a cat, a dog, and a goldfish.

This is a list of three items:

1. Cat
2. Dog
3. Goldfish

We can have lists with two items, three items, or any number above one. However, in written English we usually don’t list many things as it can be confusing.

The Basic Rules of Listing

The shortest list you could have would contain two items:

• She has a cat and a dog.

In this list, there are two items:

1. Cat
2. Dog

These are linked by the word “and.” There are no commas here. The formula is simply:

ITEM 1 + and + ITEM 2

When we have more than two items, we use commas:

• She has a cat, a dog, and a goldfish.

Here, the structure is:

ITEM 1 + COMMA + ITEM 2 + COMMA + and + ITEM 3

We can just add more items to this list. The structure is the same but there’s a comma between each additional item:

• She has a cat, a dog, a goldfish, and a tortoise.
• She has a cat, a dog, a goldfish, a tortoise, and a parrot.

Notice how we add an extra comma but the structure is the same.

Of course, sometimes we don’t use “and” at the end:

• He’s not sure where he wants to go on holiday this summer. He’s got it narrowed down to either Barcelona, Paris, Milan, or Berlin.

This list of four items follows the same structure as above but with “or” instead of “and.”

ITEM 1 + COMMA + ITEM 2 + COMMA + ITEM 3 + COMMA + or + ITEM 4

Advanced List Rules

In academic writing, sometimes lists can be quite complicated. For example, whilst listed items are separated by commas, sometimes a list might contain items that contain commas. How do we deal with this?

When the items in a list contain commas, we tend to use semi-colons to separate the items:

• My favourite authors are F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote The Great Gatsby; Ernest Hemingway, who wrote The Sun Also Rises; and George Orwell, who wrote 1984.

This list contains three items:

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote The Great Gatsby
2. Ernest Hemingway, who wrote The Sun Also Rises
3. and George Orwell, who wrote 1984

You can see that each item includes a comma, so using semi-colons to divide them makes it much easier for the reader to understand what you mean.

This doesn’t only apply when each part has a comma. Sometimes just one of them does:

• Its new features include a better camera, which was one of the device’s early weaknesses; a better screen; and a faster processor.

In this case, only the first item contained a comma, but using semi-colons made the list easier to understand.

Additional Information

The Oxford Comma: Is it Necessary?

You’ve perhaps seen lists like the above but without a comma before “and/or.”

This is technically correct but it’s not a smart way of writing. The Oxford comma is much more logical and avoids confusion.

The Oxford comma is when you put that final comma before “and/or.” It helps the reader to understand your meaning. I wrote about it in more detail here. In that article, you will find specific examples related to IELTS that show why the Oxford comma is more logical.

Parallelism

We should finally talk a little about parallelism. This word refers to the parts of a list being the same. For example, we should make sure that we list three verbs rather than two verbs and a noun:

• BAD SENTENCE: I like reading, writing, and food.
• GOOD SENTENCE: I like reading, writing, and eating.

Basically, a sentence with proper parallelism has each item in the list in approximately the same form to avoid confusion. This is discussed more in this article.