News coverage — whether it be print media, television, or the Internet — is filled with lists. There are the ten top grossing movies, the one hundred best places to live, the dozen unspoiled vacation spots, the thirty best universities to attend, the fifty finest restaurants in the U.S. You name it; there’s a list for it.
And, given the current state of the economy, I am sure there will be lists like these: the ten best ways to save gas, the twenty ways to stretch your grocery dollar, the fifty ways to reduce household costs, the one hundred recipes for cooking a meal for four under ten dollars.
Lists have taken the place of serious reportorial writing. Instead of providing an article with a beginning, a middle, and an end, today’s writers feature lists. You just have to wait in line at the check-out counter to notice this phenomenon in the tabloids. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s everywhere.
Actually, I’m a list person myself. I make To Do lists daily, grocery lists weekly. I even make lists of what I want to take on a trip. I like the organization it provides. But when I was a freelance writer (which I was for twenty-five years), I would never have considered submitting a list as the final product of an article. Call me a purist, but I went with traditional paragraphs instead. They required transitions, a logical flow, and a double check to make sure I wasn’t using the same word more than once.
With that in mind, maybe I should switch to lists. My ideal one would consist of the top three pronouns people no longer use correctly, the top ten nouns that are turning into verbs (i.e., I Googled® it.), and the top twenty grammar rules that are going by the board.
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