12 Things You Should Know About Lists

I’ve received plenty of advice or, more precisely, offers to subscribe to newsletters, attend webinars, or purchase books on how to get more traffic to one’s blog. I’ve never been all that interested in them though, truth to tell, I sometimes read a few paragraphs or so. One of the great “formulas” for blog writing is “The List” which, for some odd reason, amuses the hell out of me.

Lists are ubiquitous and endless. Virtually anything you can think of has been – or can be – reduced to a list and chances are someone has created one. In that spirit, today I did a little poking around to confirm my suspicions. For your dining pleasure I bring you 12 lists of 12 things you should know about something or another.

1. 12 Things You Didn’t Know Your Smartphone Could Do
2. 12 Things to Know About Medicare Advantage Plans
3. 12 Things to Know About “Lifted” Suspension Engineering
4. 12 Things I Wish I’d Known
5. 12 Things Wedding Photographers Want to Tell You, But Can’t
6. 12 Things You Didn’t Know You Could do With Mason Jars
7. 12 Things No One Ever Tells You About Babies
8. 12 Things Every Gender-Nonconforming Child Wants You to Know
9. 12 Things You Might Not Know About World of Warcraft
10. 12 Things Your Nail Salon Doesn’t Want You to Know
11. 12 Things You Might Not Know About Elephants
12. 12 Things You Should Be Able to Say About Yourself

I got these from searching Google for the phrase “12 things you should know about”, which returned a little less than 50 pages of reasonably relevant material. Some of the results were for different size lists. Five, ten, and seven are pretty popular size lists as well, each one returning around 40 pages, though the time-honored dozen provided the largest return.

I don’t know what this means or what it says about us (writers and readers). I’m not really big on formulaic writing, though I’ve recently done quite a few case studies, which must follow a basic format in order for them to make sense. Still, there’s something about the ubiquity of lists that grates on me a bit. Maybe my next post should be “13 Reasons I Can’t Stand Lists.”