Posted
August 30, 2010
Categories
Writing
Comments
- With a list, you can quickly fill up the page without having to actually write very much. It’s kind of like using a really big typeface to get out of writing a long book report.
- Similarly, when a list is all you write, who needs to revise! Publishing a list is like publishing an outline. It’s so easy; anyone can be a writer now!
- A series of lists invites the reader to scan the page, skipping around, picking and choosing, getting disoriented and finally arriving at an incomplete idea.
- Lists often suggest a false priority of ideas. This is actually the most important point on my list, but I put it third because these are listed in the order that they came to mind.
- Lists often suggest a priority of ideas when in fact there is none. In such cases, a paragraph would do nicely, if it weren’t for point 1 above.
- Nested lists! Why bother to explain a complex relationship!
- They’re also fun to read.
- They make it so much easier to understand what’s going on.
- Lists invite little design arguments over whether to use bullets, boxes, circles, numbers or, my personal favorite, hiragana characters. Should we indent the lists?
- Lists of paragraphs are better than a regular old series of paragraphs, because with a list of paragraphs you get to have more fun with the design (see #7 above)
- Finally, lists are easy to tack onto later, without worrying about anything looking like it is out of place.
- A list just begs you to come up with ten items. It gets you cool points when you do it.
Are you saying that publications like the Rolling Stone have become a creative wasteland with their Top 200 lists or entire issues dedicated to the 100 Best Beatles songs?
Well, I didn’t have Rolling Stone in mind when I wrote this; now that you mention it, yes! What’s the point of listing a top list without explaining why they’re on the list, what’s better about #90 vs. #101, how the rankings were determined and so on? Anybody can make a playlist of the “best songs ever”. I would expect more from a journalist.