Have we lost the ability to follow an idea that is more than a paragraph long? Even I find myself halfway through a interesting article debating about whether to finish it. The Internet's solution to this new developing A.D.D. is the LIST.
Top 10 movies this summer!
5 Reasons Obama need to fix "issue"
7 Things BP isn't telling us.
11 Alternative Energy Myths
I am not saying that a list is a bad tool for communication. It does its job quite well. The problem is its ubiquity. Even news sites with a wonderful reputation are capable of distracting us with a list instead of providing good reporting. Because you are filling your page with any number of topics, you relieve yourself from the responsibility of analysis. If I can recall some lessons from English in high school: the work worth writing (reading in our case) provides answers to questions like what/who?, when/where?, why?, are there alternatives?, and so on. Lists tell us a bunch of shallow "whats."
So "why" should we care?
It's Earnest Hemingway's Birthday.
"All you have to do is write one true sentence"
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