Comments on: Ten Reasons We Are Seeing An Excess of Lists of Ten Things We Should Know

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 05:17:42 +0000

I think you meant “hence” rather than “ergo” in #3.

Don’t forget the original list that came to 10 arbitrarily–the Commandments. Don’t worship other gods and don’t worship idols don’t need to be separate rules. Not to mention two of the rules are Do’s and eight are don’ts. That’s a little weird.

Oddly, the American Bill of Rights did come to 10 by coincidence, as two of the 12 proposed amendments didn’t pass with the others.

By: ben

ben — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 21:21:26 +0000

I would like to challenge the 3rd bullet point.

Earlier today, I happened across the “Entangled bank” passage, the last paragraph of Darwin’s masterpiece, which was quoted by some other blog for effect.

The second sentence was a series of independent clauses concatenated with semicolons. I thought to myself, “I wish he would have made this a bulleted list. It would have been easier to follow.”

But, although that would have taken fewer WORDS, it would have taken more SPACE. That is completely immaterial, or even beneficial, in a hypertext document like a blog post; the only important measurement of “document size” is bytes of information, the number of characters the server has to ship to my computer. But, in a book, “document size” is basically measured by pages. That’s apart from the difference in DISPLAY conditions between a computer screen and a book page.

Bullet-point lists are optimal to different conditions than large, solid paragraphs with linking sentences.

By: worldtoptenz

worldtoptenz — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:39:49 +0000

yes it is easy to understand the top 10 best things World Top Tenz

By: Desde el Más Allá

Desde el Más Allá — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 23:34:45 +0000

On december 2009 a friend of mine a me invented the “seven items decalogue” that makes “10 thing lists” easier to be made. It’s also called the “mobile decalogue” because his state-of-the-art tecnology makes it posible to use it with 7 to 13 “things”. Is copyleft, so you can use it free.

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/12/09/desde_el_mas_alla/1260389844.html

By: David

David — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:09:04 +0000

I think the reason is more prosaic: most blogging advice out there includes the item ‘write titles that start with # x about y’, because these titles generate more web clicks. I tend to see these titles as evidence of creative laziness, with rare exceptions. great post!

By: Malcolm MacIver

Malcolm MacIver — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 22:59:30 +0000

@Justin – I knew I was missing something. Thanks for that. @Matt – you’re right – thanks for the correction.

@Lon – yes, we’ve seen “top ten” lists for years. But there seems to be an increase in how often we are seeing them. I haven’t taken a really careful look, but besides the simple google news search I mentioned above, you can see an upward trend in the google news archive. Search for “allintitle: ten-things OR 10-things” (without quotes) here: http://news.google.com/archivesearch. Of course, to be more careful, one would want to normalize by the number of articles per year etc., but it is suggestive that we are going ten-list happy!

By: Lon Phillips

Lon Phillips — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:43:32 +0000

Actually, David Letterman does Top Ten lists and have been doing them since he started Late Night. The tradition goes back bunches of years!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:03:30 +0000

Invariably, these top ten lists have separate pages to click through, which means more page loads, and more ad impressions, and thus it is because of money, duh!

By: mrlizard

mrlizard — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:23:23 +0000

Way back when – the Wallechinskys (David, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace) sold millions of copies of “The Book of Lists”.
We just love lists. Always have. Always will

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:47:19 +0000

I write a blog based on this premise. It started Nov last year, and it’s reasonably popular (at least by my standards. But I’m Canadian).

http://tenthingsivelearned.com/

I find that it helps to organize my thoughts, and I encourage guestposts from other folks who might not be up for writing essays, but do want to express details of their experiences.

The thing is, writing ten good and separate things about one experience is actually more difficult than one might think. It’s easy to do…hard to do well (and, for the record, I know I don’t always do it well..!!).

Thanks for the article, Malcolm.