[Journey]

Hi to all. This is my first post and hope someone can help with a perplexing problem I've just uncountered.

I recently joined a company where they do not use the full stop/period except to terminate a sentence. For example, they do not use it for any of the following abbreviations:
Mr.
Mrs.
Jr.
etc.
e.g.
i.e.
Ltd.
co. (company)
a person's middle initial (John D. Doe)
et. al.
fig. (figure)
viz.
approx.


Some of these I can understand, but others seem completely daft.

This firm also does not use the full stop for bullet/number lists – even when they are complete sentences. Worse still, if a list item has two sentences, only the first sentence is terminated with the full stop; the second goes without!

I read a thread here posted in 2005 in which the “Tdol” said that “…the general tendency is moving towards not bothering with the punctuation more and more – you rarely see acronyms and other abbreviations punctuated…”

Who is deciding what is and is not punctuated? In USA, there are very good reference guides, like the Chicago Manual of Style and MLA Formatting and Style Guide for technical papers, that provide a point of agreement for writers and proofreaders. But, here in the UK I haven’t seen anything definitive. I’m worried because I see so many mistakes in grammar and punctuation here, it is difficult to know what or who to believe -- it seems completely chaotic!

Many thanks.