A number of editors have asked for my year-end "top ten". As I despair top tens, I declined. In the spirit of play, one editor responded by asking for my top ten reasons for not liking top tens, and in the spirit of play I offered a ten-item piece I wrote for a literary textbook designed for at-risk kids in Canada.

THE RULES

The first rule is stated

The second rule is less important than the first

The third rule is, grammatically incorrect

There is no fourth rule

The fifth rule is new

The sixth rule CONTAINS upper-case-letters

The seventh rule does not discriminate

The eighth rule was not arrived at through consensus

The ninth rule prohibits

The tenth rule strictly prohibits