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The Roar

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The top ten reasons not to write a top ten of 2016's best moments

Is Usain Bolt ready for the A-League? (EPA/ANTONIO LACERDA)
Expert
22nd December, 2016
11

Disarm all typography, put down your bullet points and step away from the keyboard. You are forbidden from attempting to unfairly encapsulate The Year of Glorious Uncertainty inside the confines of a listicle.

Any attempts to crudely summarise 2016 are tantamount to conduct befitting the Harambe gunman/Ryan Lochte/any other 2016 douche. Such actions can be used against you in a court of law, so exercise your right to remain silent.

2016 not only transcends the 600-word dot-point format, it transcends sports. It eclipsed anything you and I will ever achieve in our lives, unless one of us rises from the dead at 86 to snare a 7-fer at Lord’s.

So in the spirit of disparaging the concept of lists, here is a list. Much like a list, it lists reasons why you shouldn’t write a list.

Most fittingly, it’s in no particular order, and it has nothing to do with the miraculous prestige of the last 12 months.

10. Lists are boring
The format usually relies on drudgery about celebrity and the petty life issues of millennials. These are topics so mind-numbing we are left begging for the top ten reasons why we shouldn’t apply a welding torch to the eyeballs.

Don’t bore with a list. Give us something spectacular with thrills, spills and paragraphs. Might I suggest a dazzling liquid narrative about overcoming ridiculous odds from nowhere while carrying a cluster of crippling injuries and historical burden?

See: 2016 – Bulldogs, Western.

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9. Lists are lazy
There was a reason Dad pestered you about wasting your youth reading lingerie catalogues and taking long showers. He was paranoid about you becoming lazy, worthless, and worst of all, someone who wrote lists.

Don’t be list-lazy. Be someone with vibrancy, determination, and if possible, a 29.7 points per game average in the NBA Finals.

Would LeBron James have hauled the Cleveland Cavaliers to their drought-breaking championship if he was the kind of chump who wrote lists?

8. Lists are mundane
Lists are for banal everyday stuff like clickbait, groceries and hitmen. Plus they are the bread and butter of the semi-illiterate, which is why they overrun OK! magazine.

Basically, lists are happening thousands of times a day, not once every 108 years. Do something infrequent like the Chicago Cubs did.

7. Lists are superfluous
Lists are everywhere, clogging up feeds and cannibalising column space. Like anything crowding the marketplace, they should be closed down, or at the very least, merged on to Fantales wrappers.

Basically, lists are like the former version of Cronulla.

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Shun redundant writing and be like the hoodoo-destroying new-age Sharks, otherwise you’ll probably end up folding or considering relocation to Perth.

cronulla-sharks-nrl-grand-final-2016-rugby-league-premiership

6. Lists are forgettable
Nobody will ever forget the important stories like Brexit, Brangelina or Ben Barba. Well, not while ever there is Google anyway.

On the other hand, lists are totally non-descript. They will never stand out in your memory as something remarkable, meaning they are destined to never win the Premier League at 8000/1 like Leicester City.

(Can be read as Lister City if you’re a smart alec or a Kiwi.)

5. Lists are not groundbreaking
Fact: writing ‘Ten things you never knew about your Super Nintendo’ will never make you Neil Armstrong. Nor will it make you Buzz Aldrin, or even one of the thousands of monkeys or dogs sent in to orbit, for that matter.

If one is to blaze a trail, they must avoid lists. Or alternatively, win Olympic gold in the womens’ Rugby Sevens at Rio.

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4. Lists are so predictable
Lists are condemned as ‘liable to forecasting’. They are like Christmas albums, Australians abroad in lands of cultural sensitivity, and any race involving Michael Phelps at the Rio Olympics. You just know what is going to happen.

3. Lists aren’t for Christmas time anyway. Wouldn’t you rather be watching Home Alone?
That’s where Kevin McCallister uses guile and perseverance to beat the bad guys. Like Iceland did to England at the Euros.

2. Lists are not worthwhile
Lists won’t win you cool stuff like the attention of girls or Pokemon. You’ve got to be special, like someone who has captured the hearts and minds of a nation by winning an unlikely Olympic gold medal in the freestyle at Rio.

So instead of writing a list, be like one of our champion swimmers and do something that captures everyone’s attention.

(I’m referring to Kyle Chalmers. Don’t tweak a passenger’s nipple on a plane.)

1. Sometimes you can’t finish a list because you run out of time
Usain Bolt would’ve been fast enough.

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