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The “articles” we are talking about, of course are all those instances of the word the, which grammarians call the “definite article”. (The word “a” is referred to as the “indefinite article”, by the way.) In bullet-point format (and in newspaper headlines, incidentally), it is customary to drop articles freely and let the nouns stand alone. But there are times when at least some of them absolutely need to be retained. For instance, there is a difference between “school” and “the school” that needs preserving; the former relates to all schools, perhaps the very concept of educating children, whereas the second clearly refers to one particular establishment. Consider the difference between, “School is appalling.” and “The school is appalling.” There is also the issue of what I call “internal articles”. When we change 'the cost of living' to 'cost of living' we have dropped a leading article. When, on the other hand, we change sign of the times to sign of times then we have dropped an internal article. I would argue that dropping a leading article will often be acceptable, whilst internal articles should usually be preserved. Why? Simply because when we remove words from inside a phrase like this, it is harder for the reader to put them back. However colloquially we speak, we will always use 'sign of the times' in speech rather than 'sign of times', so I would argue that we should always retain the form in writing. Most people when reading turn the written words into ones they imagine being spoken in their heads, so the writer’s task is to facilitate this process, and preserving the internal articles is one way to do this. We’ve seen that PowerPoint requires a grammar, albeit a new, pared-down grammar, if its communications are to be understood. As things stand, the battle to establish such a grammar against the forces of grammatical anarchy is only just beginning. The other great new communications innovation of the age (if we accept that email is just an evolution of the written letter) is text messaging. It’s generally accepted that that grammatical battle in that realm has been firmly lost and anarchy reigns. Given that the text messaging medium continues to prosper nonetheless, why should we worry about establishing a grammar for PowerPoint? Quite simply, it is because text messaging is a medium for private ommunications, where there is a wealth of external context to the message in terms of existing and ongoing relationships. PowerPoint, however, is about public communication, often to strangers and has to be able to stand on its own. I suggest that how we write our shopping lists and sticky notes matters not, but how we write our dissertations and public speeches certainly does. http://www.indezine.com/articles/newgrammar2.html
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