Five Reasons I Despise Listicles

If Moses had brought a donkey or two up Mt. Horeb, God might have sent him down with a dozen tablets inscribed (on both sides) with the text of something titled A Treatise on the Nature of Good and Evil, and on the Covenant Between the God of Abraham and His Chosen People. Instead, the Old Testament assures us, God gave Moses two tablets inscribed with ten commandments. The size of the font has been lost to scholarship, but we may assume it was large. Anyone who has an axe to grind with listicles should proceed with caution – they go way back.

Listicles are those lists that have been popping up all over the Internet lately. Covering everything from historical curiosities (“Top 10 Incredible Badasses You Don’t Know”) to manners and morals (“Ten Things You Should Never Say to A Swede”), they may well represent the future of opinion and feature writing. Here on Patheos, Ashley Willis’ “Ten Things You Probably Shouldn’t Say to Moms of Boys” has been shared more than 226,000 times.

For once, this is not a typo. But it is a crying shame. Here’s why:

1. Listicles give every two-bit content provider the chance to play Moses. Considering the number beginning “Why You Should” or “Why You Should Never,” there are an awful lot of people who would re-order our lives for us. If a mouthpiece for the Mayo Clinic wants to give me 10 reasons I should “get physical,” well, okay. But why, pray, should I pay AskMen’s Andrew Moore any mind when he offers me 10 reasons I should marry? If I take his advice and end up miserable, can I haul him into court? Or maybe these little roadmaps to happiness and health are more like horoscopes, meant to be used for entertainment purposes only. It’s hard to tell when they all look alike.

2. Listicles reinforce bad reading habits. A few years ago, in an essay titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr unpacked research suggesting that the Internet, by overwhelming us with facile information, is changing the way our brains process the written word. Most of the change is not for the better. In one study, researchers from University College London concluded that most people who read online skim or “power browse” rather than study any text intensively. With its substance neatly summarized in a number of bolded sentence fragments, the listicle practically dares readers: “Skim me, big boy, and forget all about me. But first pass me around to all your friends.”

3. Listicles take the fun out of writing. Warning the would-be writers of Cambridge University on the dangers of “extraneous Ornament,” Sir Arthur Quillen-Couch ordered them: “Murder your darlings.” Fair enough, but the formal demands of the listicle impose a journalistic one-child policy, at best. Stripped of everything superfluous to its exhortations, a listicle makes the most strident opinion piece look like a Montaigne essay in comparison. For writers who didn’t get into writing in order to preach – a statement which, I suspect, applies to most of them – being stuck writing listicles means being rendered SOL.

4. Listicles Don’t Concede Points to the Other Guy. I’ve always admired any writer who can wrap up his own case and then say, “On the other hand…” Even if the concession is a token one, it helps establish him or her as a reasonable person and serves to maintain a decorous tone. You can’t do that in a listicle, since it would mean giving it an arch title like “Ten Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Catching Ebola (And One Reason Why You Should!).” Alluding to ambivalence in a listicle is like stowing a duffel bag in an overhead bin.

At the same time, listicles make unwieldy implements for dueling. Let’s say you’re a pundit who takes exception to a rival’s listicle. Will you have to answer with a listicle of your own — “Ten Reasons Why So-and-So Has It Wrong”? And what if your listicle has fewer points than the one you’re hoping to take down? Will readers take that as an automatic forfeiture? Pope Leo X thought thought one encyclical would beat Luther’s 95 Theses, and look where that got us.

5. The Damn Titles All Sound Alike. Granted, given the shelf life of your average thousand-word nonfiction piece, there are practical reasons for editors not to wrack their brains thinking of titles that will mark them for posterity. And even plenty of longer and weightier essays have boilerplate titles like “On X,” “Against Y,” “In Defense of Z.” But here, as everywhere else, listicles carry the implications of perishability and interchangability to criminal extremes. If you don’t believe me, just Google the words Top + 10 + Things + Women. You’ll feel as though you’re in a huge field of dandelions.

It should go without saying that listicles are low-hanging fruit. No reader of taste is running around shouting, “Whoopee, more listicles!” Yet they’re here to stay, and probably for good reason. Easy to read and easier to debate, they invite audience participation, which is one of the great draws of the Internet. Writing them demands enough orderliness of mind to arrange facts and opinions hierarchically. Capable writers can accomplish impressive things with the form, as Eve Tushnet does in “Zounds: Five Reflections on the Wounds of Christ” and Tim Walker does in “Five Bad American Habits I Kicked in Finland.”

Actually, I still haven’t read Walker’s piece. Maybe I should put the fact that I just pretended to in a piece titled “Five Reasons You Know the Listicle Has Arrived.”