• That’s because you submitted two sentences with some dots in them and not properly formatted html with <ul> and <li> 
    • Had you done <pre> pastedtext </pre> the formatting would’ve been preserved
    • What you want is almost impossible from a back end program and a simple text area
    • have you tried pasting bold, italic or different fonts into your text area?

1. Using the pre (for preformatted) tag is as close as you will get
2. without implementing a WYSIWYG editor on your form