The creation of a list ... is a familiar academic exercise: it is a traditional task assigned to dissertation students or to ambitious undergraduates, and as teachers and scholars, we often find ourselves doing the same thing. List-making gives us the illusion that we are working, and implies that academic work or scholarly work in general is incremental; it is just a matter of, say, marshalling the evidence to suggest or support whatever thesis we come up with, or in most cases doing these two things in reverse order. But for many of us, this comforting task, having been performed a few times, no longer functions as it once did. The once satisfying illusion seems to have lost its power, and the resultant list deteriorates into something else: not a coherent body of information, but rather a bunch of titles.

{Joseph Dane, Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History, 131}

If there's one thing I've learned about my research and writing process in the three years since filing my dissertation—which was, for the record, finished under such pressure and with break-neck speed that it's hard to explain "how" I actually wrote it—it's that lists are necessary illusions.