The Beauty of Lists

Customers may give up trying to read your prose if you confront them with long-winded blocks of text. Lists can be an easy formatting solution to the challenge of keeping readers’ attention.

Here’s a beautifully formatted list from a New York Times article about a badly designed website:

When conceiving a contest — or any other attempt to drive traffic with user-generated content — it’s important to keep a few things in mind:

•    Make sure the contest aims at an audience of potential and current customers.
•    Give them incentives to contribute (prizes, recognition).
•    Give them reasons to keep coming back (picking daily or monthly winners).
•    Promote the contest through multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube).
•    Promote the contest on appropriate travel blogs.
•    Create new contests and promotions on a regular basis
.

See how much less appetizing those sentences look in paragraph form?

When conceiving a contest — or any other attempt to drive traffic with user-generated content — it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First, make sure the contest aims at an audience of potential and current customers. Give them incentives to contribute (prizes, recognition). Give them reasons to keep coming back (picking daily or monthly winners). Promote the contest through multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). Promote the contest on appropriate travel blogs. And create new contests and promotions on a regular basis.

Even with a sequence of crisp sentences that all start with calls to action, the paragraph format buries the writer’s ideas.

Strategically deployed lists hand your ideas to a reader item by item – making you likelier to hold your reader’s attention through every line.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation as well as tips for formatting a bulleted or numbered list. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.