Often you see writers' blogs that are nothing but lists; the ten best, worst and everything. They were told that lists are best suited to attract readers. Converting everything into lists means they have stopped writing. They are listing. There are useful lists like your shopping list, and then there are millions of useless lists like the ones you find on the internet.
English speakers tend to publish lists with titles such as The Ten Best Cat Jokes or Five Reasons To Avoid Heavy Traffic. Worse, there are people out there encouraging them to publish such lists to attract readers. Chances are, if you have to say something, you get your readers either way. There are in fact so many lists on the Internet that you tend to stand out if you don't do lists.
Where does this list craze come from? Lists give people a good feeling. If it is on a list, it is organized. Listed things are under control. And making a list makes things seem more important. That may all be true when you draw up your own lists. Your shopping list is an undervalued helper to save money and trips to the shopping mall. And my uncle is a great believer in his daily to-do-list. Not that he doesn't know anyhow what he needs to do. He says: 'Others get their high from smoking pot, I get mine when ticking off my to-do-list.'
This principle was recognized by online media early on. Now the web is so clogged up with lists, its not worth doing a search for one. The word list in the article title tended to give people a click reflex. If it is listed, it is important, right? Sadly, the word list has now become a has-been. Lists on the internet are nothing but a decoy to mask lack of imagination and content. If the title says list, the writer means zero news with less relevant content.
The Internet has opened a vast sea of data into which we surf daily. Information thrown at us by all and sundry has become overwhelming. Lists give the illusion of leading out of that impasse. Lists seem to make it possible to control the avalanche of available choices. This is as much an illusion as the information content of the internet. Most of what you read online is a rehash of predigested and only partly understood content found elsewhere.
The writer who compiled The Ten Best Books Published in 2020 never read a single one of them; the author of The Ten Best Composers in History is so tone deaf he can't distinguish One Direction's Best Song Ever from Schubert's Trout. Their lists are renamed following other listers, or lists compiled from other lists at random. That Casco by E.R. Beecher as one of the best books of 2013 only appeared as an eBook on Amazon slipped someone's attention and they never heard of composer Johann Jakob Froberger.
Lists limit content. They limit it in a way to make them an impediment to relate any meaningful information. The meaningless and useless is highlighted while important information is efficiently eliminated. the writers and compilers of these lists are usually clueless about what they are writing. They just want to rake in the views to their empty article without spending time on finding relevant information. Reading lists has become one of the worst time wasting habits ever thanks to that.
While this is all aimed at counteracting the bad advice given to writers to write lists, there are instances when lists are necessary, called for, or useful. But such lists are lists within an article to highlight the order of things, or lists of other articles you have written dealing with the same or similar theme. Meaning that the question is not To List, Or Not To List, but How To List and When To List. If the list doesn't devoid your article of the important content you wanted to impart, it might be just the thing to make things clear to readers.
Further reading
No comments:
Post a Comment