I’m growing increasingly frustrated with articles that offer information via bulleted or numbered lists.

Here’s an example:

• November is a busy shopping month
  It is during this month that a lot of businesses go in the black.
• December can get crazy shopping mad, too
  Because of multiple holidays in the month, there are a lot of shoppers out there.

I understand the reason behind it—readers rarely have time to read much anymore, so let’s bold the main takeaways so at least they have read and learned something. There are a lot of lazy readers out there, sure, but you’re only filling the slop bucket when you do things like this.

And that’s why I’m getting frustrated. I find myself just reading the bold, bulleted text, and then afterwards I feel guilty, like I did the writer a disservice by not reading the complete story. Does the writer care? If the writer put those bold, bulleted lists there, then maybe all the person cares about are eyes on a page and not deep, meaningful prose that may cause a reader to contemplate the ideas and news presented.

I may be in the minority; however, I’d rather read 1,000 words on a topic than short takeaways. If you really want to tell me what the story is about, then put it in your subhead or spell it out in the title. Just please stop with the lazy takeaways.