The Top Ten: Using Lists to Power Up Your Writing

The virtual world is full of attention traps lying in wait for the unsuspecting surfer. Click on some link and you can end up losing great chunks of your day. “Sticky” sites can be black holes in an otherwise productive schedule, as you glance up from the screen to realize that many minutes, even hours, have simply vanished.  But you can salvage something useful from these sites (or at least rationalize your loss of time) by identifying their tricks of the trade. Then apply these techniques to add interest to any business writing you’re doing online or for social media.

As Julie Andrews once sang, let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. What first drew your attention to the time-wasters you most recently visited? Along with catchy titles, chances are good that at least a few of them promised to organize some subject into a list of the best, worst, cutest or oddest. Content creators know that a list that selects and organizes almost anything is likely to draw an audience, regardless of the topic.

Part of the appeal of a list, of course, is that everyone wants to revise it to reflect their own preferences and pet peeves. The 100 Best Movies Ever Made or the Ten Worst Moments in Baseball are perfect candidates for any list of Top Ten Topics to Debate. And the debate doesn’t depend upon having any deep knowledge of the subject at hand: most of us have more opinions than we have expertise.

Ask around and almost everyone will be more than happy to offer their picks for the Ten Coolest American Cars, the Ten Most Over-Rated Novels, or the Ten Best Star Wars Quotes. Part of the fun is the almost endless options that emerge when you start to think about any list. Should Microsoft Vista, along with cold fusion and frontal lobotomies, be included as one of the Top Ten Failures of Modern Science? How about Eleanor Roosevelt versus Ayn Rand as one of the Top Ten Women of the 20^th Century?

Are you now engaged in an internal argument regarding for your own picks for these lists? Our brains seem wired to enjoy isolating any area of interest – beers, world leaders, you name it – and then organizing that content into the good, the bad and the ugly. So put this wiring to productive use in your writing and engage your potential audience with your own lists.

What questions can you answer or what advice can you give that would attract readers to your site? Identify a topic that 1) you can write about credibly and that 2) relates to a finite and rankable set of people, places, events, concepts or things. Then draw upon your expertise to sort this material into a list.

Make sure to explain the rationale for your list with accurate information and intelligent arguments, but prepare to be questioned and contradicted by your readers. That’s part of the process of engagement that this type of writing encourages: you present well-articulated arguments in favor of your choices and your audience shoots them down. When you propose a list, the key is to be bold, be persuasive and be provocative. And then you’ll be read.

Now to see this all in action, click on http://listverse.com for the mother of all list sites. Warning: you may lose the rest of your day.