5 ms·
The List of N Things
- djm 17y agoYou seem to be leaning towards the idea that these list type articles are inferior to the essay format. When reading an article I consider the clarity with which the author has expressed himself to be most important - if he can express ideas more clearly in a list than otherwise then I am all for it. I do tend to think this format is abused when people wish to write quick and dirty articles online though. For me, an article titled 'N things...' tends to be reason enough to ignore it in most cases. Also, I will admit to preferring the essay format overall. You cannot lose yourself in a list like you can in a good essay regardless of how good the content is. An essay is more like a story which sucks you in.
- cperciva 17y agoI think PG is missing something in his comparison of "list of N things" to "beginner" 5-paragraph essays: Cohesion matters. Even if they cover the same points, a good essay is far more informative than a "list of N things" article / powerpoint presenation: An essay has to tie the points together, pointing out the connections and drawing conclusions. When I was in school, my English teachers often returned essays (but not mine!) to students with "a list is not an essay" (or similar words) written in red ink. Sure, poorly written essays, in the limiting case, end up being simply a list of disconnected statements -- but students are asked to write essays in order to develop their ability to write cohesive essays, not in order to demonstrate their knowledge of the underlying facts, so PG's suggestion to 'let them write lists of n things like the pros, with numbers and no transitions or "conclusion"' utterly misses the point.
- sachinag 17y agoEssays are planned; papers are stream-of-consciousness. Readers can't follow the internal machinations of a particular writer's psyche; while you can have a revelatory essay, you still need to plan it. My best example: Woolf reads like stream of consciousness, but she was a meticulous planner: she obsessed over every word - her daily output was a mere 75-150 words.
- tptacek 17y agoI think it's the opposite, isn't it? Essays are "tentative"; they're a written document of the writer's grappling with their subject, which is why you get so many ideas while writing them.
- sachinag 17y agoI think that's only sometimes true. There are a number of well-written proscriptive essays where the author chooses to ignore paths that proved fruitless during her time drafting the essay. Furthermore, even personal essays can leave out sidebars that prove to be meaningless distractions. If I used Etherpad, I'm sure I'd write three times as many words as there are in the finished product; I remove more than I write, and I think that's the case for most people who take the craft seriously (regardless of skill, of which I have little beyond passion). On the process of writing, however, you're spot on.
- ankeshk 17y agoI remember Guy Kawasaki saying he tries to follow this list of N things tactic for all his speeches so that people don't have a problem of following him. They won't doze off. Two other quick formats of writing essays: 1. "The secrets of telling a story well are three: i. How to end ii. Where to begin iii. What to leave out." - Roy H. Williams. In that order. Determine the end first. And you can take your readers on to a journey. Surprise and delight them by connecting seemingly unrelated stories. Malcolm Gladwell uses this format very well. 2. Another format is answering 3 questions: i. What is the problem? ii. Why is it the problem? iii. How to solve it? Makes writing easier, quicker and more comprehensive.
- jamesbritt 17y ago"I remember Guy Kawasaki saying he tries to follow this list of N things tactic for all his speeches" It helps the audience judge about how long something will be going on for. With print, you don't need that, since you can see the length of the piece in advance.
- pingswept 17y agoI don't know-- I've eaten some pretty bad cheeseburgers at good restaurants.
- tptacek 17y agoThe simplest dishes are usually the hardest to make; they're least forgiving of errors or compromises. I read that in the essay and wondered whether that was really the case with top-N-list essays as well.
- baha_man 17y agoHow can you call a restaurant good if they can't even serve a decent cheeseburger?
- jokull 17y agoI live in London and these Brits cannot make an honest, decent hamburger. The good ones are ones in fancy dress. The simple ones are dry meatballs of a pale sickly color. They've got a nice sandwich chain called Pret a Manger that make consistently good food however. And a very strong café americano.
- movix 17y agoTimeline from live chicken to Pret a Manger Chicken Wrap? Live, dead, cooked, chopped, wrapped = 55 minutes
- byrneseyeview 17y agoI've eaten some amazing cheeseburgers at really bad restaurants. Maybe they serve bad cheeseburgers so you'll tell your friends -- that way, they'll avoid having any customers who regularly converse with someone willing to admit he orders cheeseburgers.
- whatusername 17y agoChicken Parmigiana is my "safe-bet" food if I'm eating somewhere I don't trust.
- andreyf 17y agoSorry for nitpicking, but first sentence should be I'll bet you, not I bet you.
- abstractbill 17y agoI think the "I'll bet you..." form is more standard in the US, but saying "I bet you..." is definitely acceptable, and in my experience is actually much more common in some other English-speaking countries (e.g. England itself).
- andreyf 17y agoThat's strange. I can't find a single example online where "you" isn't the subject of the bet (for example, I bet you look good on the dance floor).
- jokull 17y agoPaul Graham has managed to set himself up an army of nitpickers (free editors).
- pg 17y agoAn alarming vision. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nit http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nit
- tptacek 17y agoLists are just writing devices. There are lots of other writing devices, and they all serve the same purpose: as scaffolding for building up ideas and communicating effectively. Some of the popular ones: * Socratic dialog (ie, the openings of G.E.B. chapters) * Extended metaphor (ie, mechanical_fish's zoo comment) * Anthopomorphism (ie, Gruber's adventures of the washed-up brushed metal theme) * F.A.Q. * Narrative (ie, Ivan Krstic's Porsche story --- which, again, who knew Ivan had that in him? Wow!) And my point is just, all these devices can be abused, and all of them can serve a purpose. There's no profound reason Top-N is popular; the reason it's there is straightforward: every "how to have a popular blog" post lists it as a key technique for engaging A.D.D. Internet readers.
- fjabre 17y agoThe 3 Reasons I agree with tptacek's statement: 1. It puts everything in perspective. After all, essay is just another one of several devices to convey a point through writing. 2. He clearly states that any one of these devices can be abused. Surely anyone can write a crappy and spam-filled essay with a catchy title just as they can do so with a list. 3. Clearly many people surfing the Internet do have A.D.D. Perhaps the cause is the Internet itself but it doesn't matter, the end result is the same - namely, reading material for A.D.D. Internet users is in high demand. EOL
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- junior 17y agohackeado xmafia
- 10ren 17y ago* mechanical_fish's zoo comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 * Gruber's adventures of the washed-up brushed metal theme ???? * Ivan Krstic's Porsche story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424506 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424506
- joez 17y agoMy favorite is when N is a nice round number like 25, 50, 100 or 101. What is the likelyhood that the exhaustive list ends up being such a marketable number? Must be very low. So I always wonder what was omitted or, more likely, what pork was added to get to the round number.
- kabuks 17y agoI actually tend to trust non-round numbers. Like 9, or 17. It indicates to me that author didn't try to fit the ideas to a number, but actually thought things through and came up with the number after the essay was written
- byrneseyeview 17y agoThat's why, when I write an article like this, I pick a number like that.
- riffer 17y agoThe insight that readers like knowing that writers have agreed to be constrained is a great one. Witness Twitter.
- fjabre 17y agoWhile PG makes some good points it sounds a little bit like why to read Shakespeare instead of Poe. I happen to like both. Although I might add the list of N things does get abused more often. I think using Cosmopolitan as an example and/or relegating the N-List format to newbie writers takes it a bit far.
- Dilpil 17y agoI wonder if this article will be a huge hit on digg?
- sayrer 17y agoThey're called listicles.
- BRadmin 17y ago"...the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years." http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html
- byrneseyeview 17y agoThe beginning of that sentence is: "Inc recently asked me who I thought were..."
- randallsquared 17y ago> You think of n/2 of them in the first 5 minutes. The word that leaps to mind here is "half". :)
- izaidi 17y agoWhy use four characters when you can use three?
- abstractbill 17y agoEvery equation included in an essay will halve its readership? ;-)
- kabuks 17y agoFinal readership = Original Readership / (2 * Equations)
- byrneseyeview 17y agoNo, 2^equations.
- Confusion 17y agoYes, more power to equations.
- aneesh 17y agoWhile we're picking nits here, n/2 is not an equation. It's an expression. An equation has an equal sign.
- kylec 17y agoTo generalize: why use n characters when you can use n-1?
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
- yan 17y agoThat protocol is cracked.com's livelihood.
- billswift 17y ago"The list of n things similarly limits the damage that can be done by a bad writer." I have more things I want to do than I have time to do them; why in the world would I waste time reading something if I expected it to be by a bad writer? I have quit reading writers before when I came across strong evidence of bias or incompetence in their writings.
- whatusername 17y agoA bad writer does not bad ideas make!
- billswift 17y agoNot necessarily, but the converse IS true, bad ideas make a bad writer no matter how easy to read or entertaining he may be.
- wglb 17y agoA nice way of suggesting what I have felt, and that such articles are quite often hastily prepared. Most importantly, how do we as readers have any confidence that an article titled "The 7 ..." is really inclusive or even instructive?
- bcl 17y agoThis article may have held my attention longer if it had been a list. It lost me after the 7th paragraph when I realized he was going to continue to ramble on about lists. So I skipped to the final paragraph just to be sure.
- caa09hh 17y agoI really find that to be true all the time. I would much rather click on a list of n things rather than an article about the same topic.
- kwamenum86 17y agoRegarding making explicitly numbered lists of n things in school, I am pretty sure thy do that in the lower grades, although not in essay form. For example, children have to write "5 things I learned about x" or "5 things I like about y" and are graded on relevancy and sometimes persuasiveness...if I am remembering correctly anyway.
- anigbrowl 17y agoIrrelevant, but too good to pass up with Paul's title: http://webspace.webring.com/people/fc/churud_geo/cyberiadn.html http://webspace.webring.com/people/fc/churud_geo/cyberiadn.h... ...a short bit of sci-fi for your reading pleasure.
- 10ren 17y agoThis is a charming little essay. But why? - The "exoskeleton" metaphor for an N-list having its skeletal structure on the outside made me smile. - I like the explanation of N-lists having a flat structure. Clean modules, with no dependencies. If your code can naturally fit this structure, it will be simpler. Alan Kay says that by inventing new representations, we make their users more intelligent (e.g. multiplication with Roman v.s. Arabic numerals). If your new representation enables its user to think in flat terms about what previously required nested or recursive structures, then you have done something great. - These are playful and novel ways of looking at commonplace things. They evoke my conviction that gold is all around us; just a step or two off the path is something incredible. All you need do is look. But underlying all this is the lack of any discernible ulterior motive: it's just for fun. :-)
- 10ren 17y agoI just noticed that I have an implicit conviction that pg's essays are entirely written for us, that the comments here are their beginning and their end - their entire purpose. I don't know if it's true; not that pg intends it, nor that that is how they are received. I have a strong sense that it is, without evidence.
- JBiserkov 17y agoHow to make a list of n elements? (defun list-of (n elt) (if (zerop n) nil (cons elt (list-of (- n 1) elt)))) ANSI Common Lisp, Paul Graham, page 38 1996 by Prentice Hall