The genre I am writing about is the listicle. The listicle was highly popularized by Buzzfeed. Listicles appear all over Buzzfeed including the Tasty food section, which utilizes this literary form to compile recipes, cooking tips, and other helpful food information. Research has shown that we tend to read slightly slower on computer screens. The list format helps to mitigate that, while also capitalizing on short attention spans in today’s Internet Age. Lists give us focused, annotated “tables of contents” of the Internet. This means finding recipes or dinner ideas in one consolidated place rather than scouring the Web for hours.
As long as people want stories in bite-sized formats, there will always be a place for the listicle. With the tsunami of incoming stuff on the Internet, our brains will automatically try to find a sorting mechanism and try to make sense of it, which is why we naturally gravitate to the listicle. Lists let us process complicated information spatially, transforming it from cluster to linear progression. Lists can be categories; they can be timelines; but either way, they place digestible bites of information in context of a larger whole.
Functional Purposes:
- To curate information into a numbered list that is easy to consume
- To provide information in an entertaining way that attracts younger generations.
Formal Elements:
- Title with numerical identifier
- Witty subtitle
- Picture with link to website where the information was found and caption to provide context
Texts for Genre Analysis:
19 Lazy But Brilliant Recipes That Won’t Let You Down: This article combines the “listicle” genre made popular by Buzzfeed with the simplistic style of recipes made popular by the Tasty videos. Tasty’s “anyone can cook” attitude has opened up a whole new world of food writing.
17 Cheat Sheets Every Home Cook Should Know About: This category of food listicle focuses on cooking tips rather than the actual food itself. These tips are aimed at beginner level cooks whom Tasty targets with most of all its content.
17 Useful Tips And Tricks If You Have An Instant Pot: This article highlights a specific cooking product: the instant pot. Obviously, this listicle is targeted to people whom own instant pots. As the name implies, instant pots are for people who want a easier and faster way of making certain dishes, which follows the Tasty on Buzzfeed theme of simpler cooking.
7 Facts About Potatoes That You Didn’t Know And Will Now Want To Tell Everyone: This type of listicle intends to educate the reader about a specific aspect of food or cooking, in this case potatoes. These articles tend to contain quirky, interesting facts a reader wouldn’t casually find elsewhere on the Internet.