If Paul Scheele, co-founder of Learning Strategies Corporation, had narrated the intro for The Six Million Dollar Man, it would have gone something like this:

“Steve Austin, average reader, a man barely above 200 words per minute. Gentlemen, we can retrain him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first PhotoReader. Steve Austin will be that PhotoReader. Better than he was before. Better, smarter, faster.”

OK, that was kinda cheesy, but PhotoReading really is like getting a bionic implant in your brain. They describe it as getting your reading done in the time you have, at the level of comprehension you need. Paul Scheele developed this system based on his extensive background in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), accelerated learning, and preconscious processing.

Traditional speed reading

Before we get into PhotoReading, let’s first talk about traditional speed reading. This is all about moving your eyes faster across the page. It’s not very complicated at all, and you can start doing it right now by following these tips.

1. Use your finger to keep your place on the page. If you lose your place now and then, you can waste a lot of time reading stuff you’ve already read. Keeping your finger moving also reminds you to keep your reading pace up, and frees up your mind to focus on reading instead of holding your place.

This is such a simple trick, but it’s amazingly effective.

2. Don’t subvocalize. This means that when you read a word, don’t sound it out in your head. Just see the word and your brain will know what it means.

Some people say that subvocalization aids comprehension. I don’t think it helps as much as they say, and anyway, it will stop you from reading much faster than you can imagine a voice in your head.

This is a tough habit to break completely, but it’s not too hard to make some progress if you try.

3. Use your peripheral vision. Moving your eyes all the way from one side of the page to the other makes them tired and slows you down. This is the reason that web pages today have fairly narrow columns, as opposed to web pages from the mid 90s that took up the full width of the screen.

But since you can read a word without focusing directly on it, you don’t need to move your eyes all the way back and forth. If you do that, you’re just wasting your peripheral vision on the margins.

Keep your eyes more to the middle of the page, and use your peripheral vision to read the first few and last few words on each line. (Thanks to Tim Ferriss for this speed reading tip.)

4. Kindle tip: press the “next page” button before you get to the end of the page. Probably the most common complaint I hear about the Amazon Kindle is that the page turning is too slow, despite it being 20% faster in the Kindle 2 than the Kindle 1.

I can only think that these people must be reading all the way to the last word on the page before pushing the button, so that fraction of a second seems like a long time. Instead of doing that, push the button a bit early, timing it so that the page turns right after you finish the last word.

OK, that’s basic speed reading for you. These tips alone will work wonders. For the average person, they will at least double your reading speed, easily.

Beyond just moving your eyes faster

But that’s not really enough, is it? You can only move your eyes so fast, and if you go too fast, your increased speed will come at the cost of reduced comprehension.

The average person reads at 220 wpm, and only 1% of all people can read at 400 wpm. How then, can PhotoReading catapult average readers far past the 1% level? Because it’s not based on moving your eyes faster across the page.

Time for a little reading comprehension test. Go ahead and read this paragraph:

“With hocked gems financing him, our hero bravely defied all scornful laughter that tried to prevent his scheme. ‘Your eyes deceive,’ he had said. ‘An egg, not a table, correctly typifies this unexplored planet.’ Now three sturdy sisters sought proof. Forging along, sometimes through calm vastness, yet more often very turbulent peaks and valleys, days became weeks as many doubters spread fearful rumors about the edge. At last from nowhere welcome winged creatures appeared, signifying momentous success.”

You probably think it makes no sense at all. That’s because you’re missing the context.

In 1971, Dooling and Lachman ran an experiment using this paragraph. Half the subjects read it without being given a title, and had very poor recall. But half the subjects were told that the title was “Christopher Columbus Discovering America,” and for them it made perfect sense.

How did you feel when you read that paragraph, not knowing what it was about? It probably wasn’t much fun. Now, what if you felt the same way as you plowed through an entire book, word by word? At best, you’d be wasting your time. At worst, you’d feel the dread of knowing you weren’t getting the information you need to pass your test or do well at your job.

If you were reading it in context, knowing up front that it was about Christopher Columbus, you would have understood “an egg, not a table” (the world being round, not flat), the three sturdy sisters seeking proof (the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria), the fearful rumors about the edge (falling off the end of the world), the welcome winged creatures (birds, indicating land was nearby), etc. You would have retained much more of it, and I’m sure you would have found it far more enjoyable to read.

I came across this paragraph in a book that had nothing to do with PhotoReading, but I used it here as an example of why reading better isn’t just about moving your eyes faster. It’s about changing the way you read, using your brain the way it works best instead of plowing through the pages with brute force.

What PhotoReading is not

PhotoReading is really a fantastic system. First though, let me talk about what I think are the two biggest downsides. These aren’t really flaws, just limitations you should be aware of.

Whenever PhotoReading is mentioned, you often see a figure of 25,000 words per minute. This needs some clarification. PhotoReading is the name of the whole reading system, as well as one of the specific steps of that system.

The PhotoReading step involves flipping through the pages at a brisk but relaxed pace of about one page per second, not reading, but mentally photographing the pages at about 25,000 words per minute. But because the PhotoReading system involves other steps, your overall reading speed will be much lower. They say it will triple your reading speed, and I think that’s a perfectly fair estimate.

Your reading speed will vary from one book to the next because you have a lot of flexibility in how you apply the system, but tripling your reading speed is no big deal for a PhotoReader. In some cases, it will be much faster.

The other thing is that PhotoReading is not appropriate for all books. When reading a murder mystery, you might want to take your time soaking up every word, and you certainly don’t want to ruin the suspense by reading anything out of order. In that case, normal reading, or perhaps traditional speed reading, would be the way to go.

You would use PhotoReading when you want to extract information out of a book, when your intent is to learn something but not necessarily to enjoy the experience of a beautifully unfolding storyline. Most of us read both kinds of books, so we’d choose the best way to read based on what kind of book it is.

What PhotoReading is

One thing you always have to keep in mind is your goal in reading your book. Is your goal to consciously process every word? No. You might choose to do so, but reading every word is not your goal per se.

Your goal might be something like learning the advantages of the new cover sheets for the TPS reports, so you can decide whether to recommend using them in your department. Your goal will be completely different for each book, and be highly personalized based on what you already know, what you need to know, and how much time you have.

Whatever your goal is, the most efficient way to achieve it is almost certainly not to read every word. In fact, you’ll probably find that only 4% to 11% of the text carries the essential meaning for you.

I know it’s hard to accept that, because we’ve been trained to read every single word, but you can check this for yourself. One of the purposes of PhotoReading is to make it easy to find the parts of the text that are relevant for you, based on what you’re trying to get out of it.

PhotoReading involves a lot of things, and I can’t cover everything here. But one of the most important differences from normal reading is that you don’t just read every word from start to finish in one pass.

Instead, you make multiple passes though it. On each pass, you identify specifically what else you want to get out of the book, and whether it’s worth spending time on that. If so, you focus your efforts on going deeper into the parts you need.

With normal reading, you could read a whole book from cover to cover, only to find that it wasn’t worth reading. With PhotoReading, you improve your comprehension on each iteration, until you reach the point of diminishing returns.

If you read the 10% of the book that contains 90% of the value, why would you want to then read the remaining 90% just to get the other 10% out of it? In the same time it takes to get 100% out of one book, you could get 90% out of 10 books. The main thing PhotoReading does is let you find the most important parts, so you don’t have to read everything blindly.

Does it work?

The most controversial aspect is the PhotoReading step itself. This is the part of the system where you flip through the book, mentally photographing one page per second by looking at them in a certain way.

Paul Scheele acknowledges that you won’t have any conscious recollection of what you’ve mentally photographed. He says you’ve put the information in your inner mind, but you then need to bring it to the conscious mind using specific activation techniques.

I can’t say with any kind of scientific certainty whether the mental photographing works, because I’m not an expert in NLP, accelerated learning, or preconscious processing. I believe that it does, but I can’t prove it.

However, I know for sure that the PhotoReading system would let you read faster with better comprehension even if you skipped the actual PhotoReading step! (Not that you should, but you could.)

Why? Because so much of the system makes sense without any leap of faith. Things like making multiple passes, having a clear purpose, taking an active approach to reading, prioritizing different parts of the material, recognizing core concepts, tailoring your approach to your specific goals, being in the right state of mind while reading, skipping text that is redundant or not relevant to you, mind mapping, associative memory techniques, utilizing a variety of reading styles, and more.

Some people try to discredit PhotoReading because they don’t accept that the subconscious mind can play an important role in reading. That’s certainly understandable, and I don’t really understand that part myself. However, these people are overlooking the many parts of the system that obviously work. Anything that the subconscious mind adds is icing on the cake.

My first real world test of the system happened when I was partway through the 9 CDs, when I went to the library. Normally I check out one book or maybe two. Any more than that, and there’s a big chance that I’ll get sidetracked by something else, and I won’t even start reading some of the books before the due date.

I just started browsing, and before I knew it, I had seven books in my hands. Seven? That was too much, and I thought I’d better put some back. But then I thought no, I’m going to see what happens. Using PhotoReading, I read three of those books later that same day. I breezed through the other four, and I went back for more. Yes, it works.

The verdict

The biggest drawback for me is that in some cases, I just don’t want to use PhotoReading for its intended purpose. That is, I really want to focus on every single word rather than extracting the information that’s important to me. Although when I hear myself saying that, it doesn’t seem to make much sense.

I think it’s tough to break the habit of reading every word, even when you know it doesn’t serve you. While you can use PhotoReading right away, they say you get better over time, and I’d guess that breaking this habit of over-reading is one of the things you get better at.

I’ve never been a scanner by nature, and when I have a good book, I really want to read it slowly. At the same time, I often read books that aren’t a work of art so much as a source of information.

For those books, it’s far better to get the information you need in a fraction of the time, so you can either read more books or have more time for other things. PhotoReading allows you the flexibility to vary your reading style to suit your needs, so I even use some of its techniques on the works of art.

I highly recommend the PhotoReading course, and I haven’t even remotely gone through all the material yet. The 9 CDs alone are terrific. I keep them in my car, and I’ve listened to them several times.

I don’t remember if I got the classic or deluxe version, but what I have also comes with a workbook, the books “PhotoReading” and “Natural Brilliance,” the 3 DVD set “PhotoReading Results Supercharger,” the “PhotoReading Activator” paraliminal CD, and the CD-ROM course “Clear Mind – Bright Future.” All of which I haven’t gotten to yet, and which are above and beyond the CDs that explain the whole system.

If you don’t have the money for it, I hope you got some good tips out of this anyway. But if you can afford the investment, PhotoReading will undoubtedly give a big boost to your reading speed, comprehension, and enjoyment. Try it risk-free, with their money-back guarantee. Of course, if you do, I’ll assume that you can just breeze through these 2,500 word posts.

Would you like to quit your day job? Then check out Ali Hale’s new free ebook, Quit Your Day Job: Getting More From Life.

If you read my review of her Staff Blogging Course, you know that Ali quit her day job a while back and now supports herself with her income from freelance blogging. But her new ebook is not specific to any particular type of work.

She tackles three main ways to make an income:

• Freelancing (a passion you can sell)
• Small business (a passion you think you can’t sell)
• Passive income (a passion you don’t want to sell)

This ebook oozes with Ali’s experience and insight, as she covers everything from mindset to specific details. As well as sharing her own thoughts, she also includes many links to great resources for more information, many of them cheap or free.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to go on and on about why this ebook is worth the purchase price. But seeing as how it’s completely free and doesn’t even require an email address, why don’t I make it simple and just give you that link again: Quit Your Day Job: Getting More From Life.

I think anyone with at least a passing interest in self-employment will be able to get something out of this. Even though I’ve read a lot on this topic already, I very much enjoyed it. (I also learned a new British English word (barmy, meaning crazy or foolish), and where the word “freelancing” comes from.)

If I had to pick one thing I didn’t like about this ebook, it would no doubt be her negative reference to The Simpsons. Really? The Simpsons? How could anyone not like The Simpsons? However, seeing as how she was making a valid point about time management when you’re starting a business, I think she can be forgiven.

Harry Potter fends off a pack of Dementors with his Patronus charm, a magical version of the LOA.

What can Harry Potter teach us about the law of attraction? What would he even need it for, if he has a magic wand? Actually, one of his most powerful charms is nothing more than the LOA in a more visible form.

Of all the evil forces Harry faces, few are as sinister as the Dementors. Immortal soul-sucking wraiths, they turn the air cold and dark, feed on positive emotions, and make people feel like they’ll never be happy again. If they succeed in carrying out “the Dementor’s Kiss,” the victim is left as an empty shell with no chance of recovery, a fate believed to be worse than death.

Fortunately, there’s a very effective defense against Dementors, called a Patronus charm. Harry simply points his wand and says the magic words “Expecto Patronum!” Unlike most of Harry’s incantations, this one is correct classical Latin, meaning “I await a protector.”

And then the protector–the Patronus–arrives, an ethereal being flowing out of his wand as bluish white light. It absorbs the Dementors’ negative energy and repels them like a dog herding sheep.

Oh, how nice it would be to just wave a wand and sit back, letting the universe send a magical protector to chase away evil while you went about your business.

But here’s the catch – even in the magical world of Harry Potter, there is no universe-appointed protector. The Patronus is just you. It comes from your own emotions and, when fully formed, appears as an animal that reflects your personality or is somehow significant to you (according to various online quizzes, mine would be a phoenix, an eagle, a hawk, or a stag).

It’s an incarnation of your deepest positive feelings, that part of you that feels no despair and is thus immune to negative energies. Remus Lupin tells Harry, “In order for it to work, you need to think of a memory. Not just any memory, a very happy memory, a very powerful memory…Allow it to fill you up…lose yourself in it.”

So the Patronus is only as good as the one conjuring it. Although it’s completely within their control, it’s still very difficult to master, especially when under the stress of facing a Dementor. Lose your focus, and the Patronus becomes a weak veil of mist that won’t protect you from a fly. Even Harry failed in his first few attempts to cast one.

Whether there’s any metaphysical basis for the law of attraction, there’s no denying that a positive attitude can work wonders in plainly obvious ways. When people are putting you down, telling you you’re no good, saying you’ll fail, it takes a tough mind to tune them out. Most people don’t.

But if you let yourself be overcome by negative thoughts, there’s no escape. You fall victim to the Dementor’s Kiss, and become an empty shell of what was once a courageous soul. And the odds of an empty shell accomplishing anything meaningful are precisely zero.

OK, I know what you’re thinking. In a fantasy world, it’s not so hard to think happy thoughts for a few seconds until an enchanted animal spews forth from your wand and saves the day. In reality, it’s a lot harder to stay positive year after year when facing obstacles that don’t run away so easily. A dead-end job, poor health, and a struggling relationship don’t instantly fix themselves when you say “Expecto Patronum.” Why can’t we live in a world where things are that simple?

True, in our world, there’s a very convoluted connection between thoughts and outcomes. Overnight success still takes years, even when you stay focused and do everything right. But if results appeared instantly, would that be any better? Not really.

There will always be challenges, and the easier they are to overcome, the quicker they’re replaced with harder ones. A world that gave more power to you would also give more power to your obstacles.

If you could unlock a door by saying “Alohomora,” people could also say “Colloportus” to make the important doors Alohomora-proof. If you could disapparate (teleport) at will, people could also use anti-disapparition jinxes to keep you where you belong. If you could knock out any enemy by saying “Stupefy,” their friends could wake them up with the counter spell “Rennervate.” There are no special breaks, even for wizards, and certainly not for you and me.

Don’t wish for the world to be less challenging. Will yourself to have the strength to deal with it. Courage doesn’t require anyone’s permission but your own.

Are you awaiting a protector? If so, when will you create one?

For much more on the law of attraction, read Greatness Without Genies: The Law of Attraction for Realists.

How do you celebrate life? Let me count the ways. OK, there are 114 ways by my count.

Of course, I’m probably biased, having just read Marelisa Fabrega’s free ebook 114 Ways to Celebrate Life.

Just click and download instantly, no email address required. Then get lots of ideas for how you can make your life more enjoyable today. It kinda reminds me of Zen Habits.

As I went though the list, I kept count of how many of these things I’ve done in the last week or so. I’ve done 11 of them, including blowing bubbles (#36), going to a baseball game (#73), and eating Lucky Charms (#83).

(It would have been 13, but unfortunately the list does not include getting something from the ice cream man, or playing basketball with a stuffed cow.)

How many of the 114 have you done recently?

Incidentally, this is an example of a list post (or list ebook) done right.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a classic book by Betty Edwards about learning how to draw. It was first published in 1979, then revised in 1989 and 1999 (the latest edition being called The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). It has a reputation for being phenomenally effective at teaching people how to draw better than they ever thought they could.

I first heard about it in Paul Scheele’s PhotoReading course. One day he was mulling over the problem of how to look at the words on a page without using his conscious mind, but at the same time without de-focusing his eyes.

He found his answer through this book, saying “I read an article about an art teacher named Betty Edwards. In her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, she said, ‘If you want to draw my thumb, don’t draw my thumb,’ because you will use the left brain–the analytical, non-artistic side of the brain. She said, ‘To draw my thumb, draw the space around my thumb.’ That strategy uses the right brain–the creative side of the brain.”

As a teacher, Betty couldn’t understand why so many of her students had a hard time drawing something that was right in front of them. She could see that they were trying, but her suggestion of “Just look at it” was always met with a frustrated “I am looking at it!”

She developed her techniques after realizing what the real problem was. Most people don’t draw what they see – they draw what they think they see.

As kids we learned a particular way to draw a sun. Maybe it’s in the corner of the page or maybe not, but surely it has lines coming out of it. And yet, whenever I’ve looked up at the sky, not once have I ever seen lines coming out of the sun.

We learned a certain way to draw a house, a dog, a car, and a person, and these methods stuck with us. Now when we think we’re drawing what we see, we’re actually just loading our mental clip art, and drawing what we think we see.

One of the main techniques in this book is drawing things upside down. The idea is that if you can’t recognize what you’re drawing, your left brain can’t load its mental clip art and tell you what the object should look like. Instead, the right brain kicks in, and you draw what you actually see.

Here we see that Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a fantastic title, having double meanings for both drawing (sketching, as well as utilizing) and right (the opposite of left, as well as the correct side of the brain to use for drawing).

People often forge signatures upside down so they can focus on the details they see, instead of making a T the way they learned to make a T. It makes sense in a way. In 10th grade English when we could look for our vocabulary words in the newspaper for extra credit, I read the paper backwards so I could focus on each individual word and not get caught up in the story (though that may not have been the teacher’s intent).

But could this really work? Wouldn’t a signature drawn upside down be all messed up after you turned it right side up? Anyway, I gave it a try, drawing these signatures upside down:

You can’t really tell if they’ll look right when you turn the paper around, but I was pleased with the results:

For comparison, here’s what I got when I drew them right side up:

Other than MLK’s signature (which is really hard to do upside down!), the two versions don’t look all that different. (BTW, is anyone else surprised that Leonardo da Vinci’s signature looks like that?)

OK, so drawing upside down works well enough for signatures (although my right side up signatures were still better). But what about when you’re drawing a real picture? Surely a sufficiently complicated subject would have so many intricacies that you couldn’t possibly get it right upside down. But let’s find out.

Before the book explains anything, one of the first exercises it gives you is drawing your self-portrait. Fortunately, you’re not asked to draw someone while hanging upside down from the monkey bars. Instead, you’re just sitting in front of a mirror and drawing your reflection. Here’s what I drew:

Yeah, it’s really awful. But what specifically is wrong with it? The main problem is that I wasn’t really drawing what I saw. Nobody’s eyes are that big, outside of a Disney cartoon. The proportions are all wrong, none of the features look right, and I couldn’t pick myself out of a lineup.

And I made what’s called “the chopped-off skull error.” If you look in a mirror, you’ll notice that your eyes are halfway between the top and bottom of your head. It’s obvious, but nobody wants to acknowledge it. We subconsciously think foreheads aren’t as important as the main features, so we put the eyes closer to the top, chopping off the skull. It’s an extremely common mistake. Even van Gogh did it in his early years.

If you draw upside down, will all these mistakes go away? In theory they should. If you don’t know what you’re drawing, you can’t bring any preconceived notions to the table. But I couldn’t help thinking that I’d make other mistakes that would have been obvious if I could see what I was doing.

Anyway, the day after drawing my self-portrait, I attempted a rather intimidating feat. The subject was a knight on a horse, with no shortage of fine detail. I was going to draw it upside down. And for an added challenge, I was going to use my non-dominant hand (though Betty doesn’t say to do this). I drew this:

I couldn’t believe what I saw when I turned the paper right side up! The biggest mistake was in the lance, where my inability to draw straight lines with my right hand forced me to draw the lines thicker as a cover-up. But overall, I was thrilled with it.

Of course, you don’t have to keep drawing upside down forever. Once you get in the habit of really looking at things, you’ll be able to draw right side up without being biased by your assumptions about what things look like.

The main thing is to just get started. How many beautiful drawings never see the light of day because people assume they don’t have enough talent? If I can draw this knight on a horse, upside down, in ink, with my weak hand, after one day of instruction, I’m sure you’d be surprised by what you can do.

But as for Betty’s theory about why her methods work, I’m pretty sure she’s wrong. We’ve all heard a lot about the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy, but almost everything we’ve heard is wrong (though the details are far beyond the scope of this post). She came under heavy attack for drawing half-brained conclusions (pun very much intended) based on this pop psychology.

However, she did the right thing in response. Instead of backing away entirely from the left-brain and right-brain distinctions, she just started using the terms L-mode (analytical) and R-mode (creative). There are very important differences between these ways of thinking, even if they aren’t neatly packaged into separate hemispheres of the brain.

But the bigger problem is that things still seem backwards. Why would looking at something upside down make you switch from L-mode to R-mode? Wouldn’t recognizing the subject and loading the associated mental clip art fall into the R-mode category? And when your recognition of the whole is disrupted and you’re forced to look at the details out of context, wouldn’t that be an L-mode activity?

Anyway, this is not to take away from the simple truth that her methods work wonders by changing your way of seeing, which determines so much. Learning about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator forever changed the way I look at personalities. Now I can’t meet someone without trying to figure out their type. In the same way, learning the basics of drawing is changing the way I look at all objects. I can’t look at something without thinking about how to draw it, or whether it really looks the way I think it does.

Even if you don’t think you like drawing, you might be surprised by what you get out of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (although you might want to skip the exercises that require equipment you won’t have). Once you learn to see, the world will never look the same again.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve gotten quite annoyed with list posts. You know, the ones with headlines like “[Number] [Adjective] Ways To [Adverb] [Verb] Your [Noun].”

It’s not that anything is wrong with this kind of headline per se, except that it’s become a formula for lazy people to exploit the flaw in our evolution that makes us inexplicably drawn to numbers. And now that the internet has become saturated with this template, even the good list posts are lost in the noise.

Sure, I’ve written a list post here and there, with 1,000 Ways To Be Happy being a sarcastic example, and the post you’re reading now being an ironic one. But every time I see a Cosmo headline, I die a little inside.

Without further ado, here are the top 10 reasons list posts suck:

1. They’re hard on the readers.

WTF am I supposed to do with 213 Ways To Achieve Inner Peace? Don’t give me 213 ways. Give me one, and make it count.

2. They’re hard on the writers.

In the time it takes someone to come up with 213 Ways To Achieve Inner Peace, they could get plenty of more useful things done. Just because something is useless doesn’t mean it’s effortless.

3. Numbers don’t reflect value.

“This guy has 10 Ways To Make Money Online. OK, let’s get started! Oh wait, this guy has 20 Ways To Make Money Online. Wow, I’m gonna be rolling in it! Wait–OMG! This guy has 50 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE! Cha-ching!”

4. List posts are easy to rehash.

Once you have a big list, you can crank out an unbelievable number of smaller list posts just by combining the items in different ways. Say you want to write about 10 Ways To Save Money. First, write a post about 100 Ways To Save Money, but don’t publish it.

Do you know how many lists of 10 you can get by taking subsets of those 100? A lot. 17,310,309,456,440 (17.3 trillion) in fact. And that’s assuming that you can’t reuse the same list in a different order. If a different order makes a list unique enough, you can get 62,815,650,955,529,472,000 (62.8 quintillion) lists of 10, starting from your list of 100.

Now what happens when everyone does that? That’s an awful lot of rehashed content.

5. Headlines are the appetizer, not the main course.

If you need a number and a spicy adjective in the headline to get people to read the post, what does that tell you about the post itself?

7. People can’t count.

Seriously, it’s ridiculous how many misnumbered list posts I’ve seen.

8. Lists give the illusion of substance.

Lists can be very useful for providing structure and organization. But in practice, they’re often used as a way to expand a few pieces of common sense into something that looks like a real post.

9. To reach whatever magical number they’re going for, bloggers often throw in a useless point.

Like this one.

10. List posts are easy social media bait.

Come on, you know you can’t resist the urge to Stumble and Tweet this. You know anything with a number is going to do well in social media, and you want to get credit for passing it along. We all do it, because the formula can’t fail. One of these days, I’ll give you 10 reasons why.