List Meat
Honestly, my heart sinks a little every time I see a list in a blog post.
Blogs contain lists. I get it. They must. Otherwise, something feels missing. When I write, it’s hard not to gravitate towards developing a list. Here’s four reasons why … look.
I’ve noticed this especially on Medium. Many top stories involve a number between 5 and 1,000 in the title:
There is absolutely no excuse for you not to master a new skill, expand your knowledge, or eventually boost your career…medium.com
Life is busy. It can feel impossible to move toward your dreams. If you have a full-time job and kids, it’s even harder…medium.com
The web is increasingly becoming a powerful resource that can easily help you learn something new everyday. These…medium.com
Work Hard, Work Smartmedium.com
These articles are list meat.
They begin with a personal experience that most people skip because they just want the list. The reader scrolls down to find the bullet points or numbered list, ignoring the paragraphs before and after the list. Most of these types of articles leave off the conclusion because the authors know that people only care about the list meat.
Why?
Consider the following story:
A city woman jumps in a cab and has a few minutes to read. She opens the Medium app on her phone and scans her feed. She sees an article that has a list of 30-something tips to make her a better, smarter person.
She taps it open, excited to improve herself. Scanning down the list, she sees a few intriguing productivity hacks on her way to the bottom. When she finishes, she feels better about herself having picked up great wisdom so quickly from the post. The cab pulls over at her stop and she taps “recommend” as she exits the vehicle. She walks hurriedly to her next appointment… not remembering a single thing about what she just read.
Lists are made for efficiency, not absorption.
The point is you are wasting your time skimming list meat. You aren’t learning anything! You read. You feel good. You forget.
The psychology of memory explains why lists are a waste of time. When you receive information, your brain stores or “encodes” it into your brain in three ways: visual (pictures), acoustic (sounds), and semantic (meaning).
When you read, you are encoding information into your memory. Whether it goes into your short-term memory or your long-term memory is up to you. This is the difference between learning and forgetting.
Psychological theory states the best way to get material to pass from short-term memory to long-term memory is meaningful association. The more intense neural connections you make in your brain — pictures, sounds, emotions, senses — the more likely you are to store it in long-term memory.
In other words, when you skim a bullet point list, the information you are encoding to your brain is devoid of meaning, emotion, and sensual experience. It never enters long-term memory. It’s as memorable as phone numbers.
When a writer boils down his writing into a list, it makes it easy for the reader to skim and save time, absorbing only what matters to them.
Great, right?
In his book, An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis calls this reading for utility. You read only for what you can get out of it. It’s like going to a buffet and taking only the desserts instead of things like kale.
When a writer makes a list, and when a reader skims, they are taking stimulation, mental connections, and long-term retention away and receiving utility and entertainment in the most forgettable format.
It’s a waste of time.
You learn best from stories, not lists.
Your brain lights up with activity when you are engrossed in a story. Your imagination is a bonfire of images you created. You are seeing, smelling, relating, and feeling — making meaningful associations — as you read a story.
Stories use the most artful way of effective communicating.
Show, don’t tell.
Show, don’t tell is a technique often employed in various kinds of texts to enable the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author’s exposition, summarization, and description. Source
Author Patrick Lencioni is a master of show, don’t tell.
He discovered the power of the fable — a fictitious tale that communicates a moral. If you open the cover of 3 Signs of a Miserable Job, you launch into a made-up story of how an executive retires with his wife in Lake Tahoe to ski. Stir-crazy, he decides to put in a few quasi-management hours at a local Italian restaurant. The book is the story of the people he meets and the observations he makes that set the stage for a grand re-entrance into the corporate world resulting in prolific success.
He could have simply listed the three signs of a miserable job and described them in his book. But he didn’t. He told a story with characters for readers to relate to and experience the three signs for themselves.
Another example of show, don’t tell stories is The New Yorker. The publication’s writers, including Malcolm Gladwell, create masterful long-form story pieces. Instead of bullet points, you find thick paragraphs. You won’t find any titles with numbers. The New Yorker writes about people primarily, telling their unique stories from beginning to end. Readers are compelled to immerse themselves in the story and thereby grow their knowledge in their long-term memory stores.
Stories help us learn by accessing our long-term memory. Lists tend to fail to go beyond our short-term memory, which lasts about 0–18 seconds.
The next time you write, I challenge you to not use a list as the meat of your post. Tell a story from your life. That’s what I want to read. (Don’t have a good story to tell? Stop watching TV and go do something remarkable.)
Let’s stop wasting our time with forgettable, short-term memory lists. Show your stories and let your reader discover your points by making connections. Let your reader experience your writing. They’ll remember it better.
Don’t get me wrong — Medium surfaces plenty of strong stories that are not lists. It’s not a platform issue. It’s a writer/reader issue. It would be great to see the Medium top stories filled with more interesting, epic stories instead of list meat.
Tell stories. Save the lists for your groceries and to-dos.
Recommend if you want to read stories more than list meat.
