Ordered List, Unordered List, The List Goes On and On

Marjory Meechan - April 17, 2007

Perhaps the most underappreciated form of writing is the simple list. We all make them. We attach them to our refrigerators to remind us to buy milk and we use them as references to track our day. What many people may not realize is that lists can be used for much more.

In her book, Approaches to Discourse Georgetown University professor, Deborah Schiffrin notes that when speakers tell a story, they often use list structures along with or, even in place of, standard narrative structures. For example:

We went to the store to buy some fruit.

• There were pears.
• And peaches.
• And oranges.
• And even some enormous melons.

There were so many kinds of fruit that we couldn’t decide between them, so we didn’t buy any at all.

If lists can be used to tell a story, it should be no surprise that lists can also be natural choices for structuring all kinds of web content, including marketing copy.

In fact, the list can be a valuable tool for composing web content. Lists add visual and semantic structure that can make any writing easier to follow and research in reading comprehension has found that students do better when presented with well-structured content in their classroom materials. These findings also carry over to the kind of writing found on commercial web sites. Studies in web usability show that structuring content with lists enhances the readability of standard promotional writing, too. When combined with concise, objective styles, content written using unordered lists improves by as much as 124%.

All this may explain why search engines place a higher value on keywords found in ordered and unordered lists. A web page containing a list of items all related to the main keyword targeted for the page is more likely to actually be relevant to that keyword. It’s just the nature of a well-structured list and something that is fairly easy for search engines to detect.

The World Wide Web Consortium has an excellent article describing the advantages of using lists in web content and the best way to go about coding them. These valuable tips can help you:

1. improve the readability of your web content
2. make your copy more understandable
3. optimize your code for multiple browser platforms
4. make your pages more attractive to search engines
5. and the list goes on and on or it could.

We often see lists used to describe a range of products or services. What else could we use a list for? What else can you do with a list?