Blogathon, Day 8: My Love And Hate Affair With Texts With Lists

When I lived in California I really understood it: Americans love lists.

You know what I mean:

10 Ways To Get Perfect Gluteus Maximus For Summer 
7 Bullet-Proof Ways To Get Stinking Rich 
6 Reasons Why You Should Never Have Kids 

I must admit that I've never been great fan of lists. For me, it seems that the writer of a list is lazy. It is so much easier to make a list than a coherent longer text.

In Estonia, very many newspaper articles are written in question and answer format. It seriously annoys me. Does the journalist think that his/her questions are oh-so-clever that he/she just needs to get them on the paper? What do they study at the journalism school? You can always push the record button on your iPhone and then literate the interview into ink. Not much journalism and editing skills needed, huh? Are these guys able to write a normal piece of news with a beginning and an end?

But as always, I've needed to take a re-look at my own opinions.

Lists are practical. They are easy and fast to read. They suit extremely well for blog posts. Hell, I've even started to write posts with lists myself. By bookmarking well-written posts with good lists you can easily collect yourself a handbook of a topic that interests you.

I also try to think that even if all the blog posts in the world would be with lists, there will still be novels, short stories and other kind of longer texts. I keep telling myself it's great that there are different discourses.

The most important thing is that the reader enjoys the text and finds it useful. Nothing else matters. If it comes with a little help from a list I just try to keep my mouth shut.