2014 was the breakout year for “listicles,” an article laid out in a list format made popular by the viral news site Buzzfeed. Listicles have received more than their fair share of flack. Many describe listicles as lazy and oversimplified, some make the claim that they ruin consumer reading habits, while others say they are ruining the writing form in general.

There are bad lists, of course, just like there is bad journalism in the traditional long form.

Lists are not lowering the standards of journalism, nor are they ruining your attention span or rotting your brain.

To easily understand why our brains love lists so much, I made a list myself.

1. Easier to read

While there’s nothing better than a well-formatted traditional article, it really does help to have the information laid out in an aesthetically structured way. Lists lay out information in a way that is pleasing to the eye, and show the reader that the information contained can be easily digested without skimming for the most important parts.

2. Easier to process

We are taught from a young age (for me it was high school) to break up information included in a text into an easy-to-read outline format. Even right now in the planning process of this article I’m making bullet points of my main arguments. Listicles feed off an impulse to immediately make sense of information; they accomplish what our brains initially do when presented with a large amount of content: it pre-categorizes and predigests the information before our brains even get to it.

3. Easily shared

Listicles promise a finite end; you know how long it is without even reading it. These types of articles gain clicks because they stand out in a sea of monotony. The viralibility and popularity of these lists are what helps them spread as easily as they do. In what is known as the ‘top-ten effect’ we generally like to “chunk” numerical lists, which in turn makes the information easier to read and digest.

4. Tackles the "Headline Society" problem

In a society where 59% of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked, information is easily spread but not actually read by users. Lists more often than not give you a better idea of the content, attracting more visitors and, therefore, increasing the potential shareability. Research has shown that formatting an objective article as a concise, scannable list can improve readability by 124%, and more readers will help the message spread among communities.

5. They can be anything

Listicles can be informative, they can be socially relevant, or they can just be silly and fun. Regardless of how they affect the writing form, they work and they are here to stay.