5 reasons why people like lists

Structuring articles and notes in the form of lists is an easy way to make them more interesting and popular. Here are five reasons why people like lists:

1. Friendly appearance . The structure of the material is clear at first glance. In the texts of another structure in one paragraph, some aspect can be described consisting of a pair of ideas; the next paragraph - the rationale of the first one; the following is an example, etc. It is possible to understand such a structure only in the process of reading. And the text-list and suggests itself to be read - each idea is numbered and rendered a separate paragraph.
2. Simple to understand structure . In a linear single-level list, each item is an autonomous logical unit. Accordingly, the reader does not need to spend efforts to grasp the logic of presentation, to trace the chain of reasoning and combinations of different types of classification.
3. Conciseness . In the texts of another structure, in order to harmoniously co-ordinate all ideas into the system, to show logical connections and chains of inference, one has to use additional phrases-combinations and separate connecting / structuring sentences. This makes the text longer and more abstract. And the reader in the article, as a rule, is interested in one or two new useful ideas, and not a comprehensive systematic presentation.
4. Concreteness In the text-list, the very structure of the presentation does not allow the author to digress to the lengthy fundamental reasoning - each paragraph in it must carry a unit of meaning, and the chain of reasoning cannot extend beyond two or four sentences of one paragraph.
5. The very availability of the list . People like the fact that there is a number and numbering. Numbers create the illusion of certainty, significance, certainty. For example, you can compare for yourself the attractiveness of two variants of titles: a) “Basic skills of highly effective people” or b) “7 skills of highly effective people”.