Writing an Essay of Classification

When you classify, you generally break a subject down into its most meaningful parts. You may also classify a subject by explaining how it fits into a larger category or grouping. When writing an essay of classification, your goal is to help readers better understand the whole (your subject) by presenting the parts. Your goal may also be to show how your subject fits into the larger scheme of things. Use the guidelines below to help you develop your work.

Step 1: Brainstorming

Make a list of subjects that could be broken down into types. Likely topics for classification essays include people or objects or activities that tell us about the people to whom they belong. Some that came to my mind are: dogs, mothers or fathers, students, coin collections, wedding rings, dinner parties, babies, teachers, golfers, pilots, racists, preachers, sermons, funerals, soccer games, basketball players, gardens, dorm rooms, part time jobs, frozen pizzas, purses, farms, drivers, families, believers, dates, presidents, beaches, sunbathers, persuasion techniques one uses with one’s parents, shoppers, hunters, fishermen, married couples, churchgoers, letters from home, friends, study habits, boyfriends or girlfriends, how people eat, and types of employees. Also, you might choose to write a classification essay that deals the our current reading of Huckleberry Finn. For example, classify the various themes from the novel, views of slavery or slaves, etc…

Step 2: Topic Selection

Select from your list a topic that you find interesting and think will prove rich in descriptive possibilities. Try to select something you often have the opportunity to observe or already know a good deal about. For purposes of illustration, I will choose from my list farms.

Step 3: Topic Development

Break your topic down into several (Yes, I will count off if you have only two!) categories, and give each category as concise a label as you can come up with. Mine would be: "Old MacDonald’s" farms. Single purpose farms run by hired managers and hands. Hobby farms. Family run dairy farms. Big owner operated farms with hired help. Small operators.

Think of something interesting or important to say about your topic that relates in some way to the labeled categories into which you divided it. You will probably have to think about your labeled categories—what they have in common with one another and how they are distinguished from one another—to find some assertion to make about them. My labeled categories for farms seem all to have to do with size; so, "Farms nowadays have to expand to survive," a sentence similar to many headlines lately in the farm magazines my husband gets, might be my working thesis statement.

Step 4: Introduction

Your introduction should make clear not only what you are going to be writing about but why you are writing about it in the first place. You need to make your audience care enough about your topic to want to know what you have to say about it. If you don't care about your topic—or if it's clear you have classified its types merely because you have been asked to write a classification essay—then you won't be able to make an audience care what you have to say about it, no matter how well you write. Your introductory paragraph, in addition to telling us what your topic is and what categories you will be using to describe it, needs to tell us about you and your relationship to the topic. I call this defining your authority, and I grade for it. The beginning of your opening paragraph will establish some sort of connection between you, the writer, and your subject that will make us want to read on and find out what you have to say about it.

Your thesis statement, as always, will assert something about your topic. What you start out with as a thesis statement, your working thesis statement, may have to be worded differently as it metamorphoses into your actual thesis statement, which will, in all likelihood, be located at the end of your opening paragraph. Here’s my opening paragraph:

I live on a farm. That is to say, I live on what used to be a farm up until a year ago but is now rental property. My husband and I lease it out to a local farmer—who is also the local bank president—for more money than we made on it ourselves in the previous two years put together. I guess that makes it still a farm, since the land is being used to produce livestock and hay; it’s just not our farm anymore. That is to say, it’s still ours. We still own it—and we live on it and brushhog it and watch cows struggling to give birth and bulls fighting on it and worry about thistles spreading on it and smell the winey smell of too green hay bales lined up like army tanks along its weedy borders and listen, still eagerly, to news of the needed rain approaching it from a distance. So, it’s still a farm, and it’s still ours, but it’s just not our farm the way it used to be when my husband and I were the farmers that farmed it. Most of the neighboring farms are in or on their way to being in just about the same sorry state: owned by someone else than the person who farms it, and farmed by someone else than the person who loves it. That is the state of farming in America these days. The family farm is a thing of the past, or, as the farm magazines tout with forced sounding vainglory, expansion spells success on the American farm of today.

Step 4: Body Organization

Look back at your labeled categories. Reword them in any way that suits them to your purpose better. Get rid of any that do not pertain or are redundant, and regroup the ones you want to cover such that you have more than one larger categories. Label these. Order them in a way that pertains to your topic—for example, in the case of my topic, from small family farm to corporate farm. An outline might help you organize your thoughts.

Step 5: Writing the Body

Begin each body paragraph with an assertion about the labeled type that will be discussed in that paragraph, then describe that category in detail in the remainder of the paragraph. You may wish to brainstorm first about each subcategory, or you may want to start right in writing. Be as concrete and objective as possible. Avoid making value judgments about your categories; rather, let the information you provide lead the reader to see things the way you do, and be as descriptive and specific as possible so that your readers will believe in your analysis. A specific example of each type may help us to see and believe in what you are arguing, but remember that you must first give us the contours of the type in general. In other words, an essay in which you tell us you have several types of friends and then describe three friends in detail without first telling us what type each belongs to and what that type is like would not work for this assignment.

Step 6: Conclusion

Write a thoughtful conclusion that reflects, but does not merely restate, your thesis and contains a change of some sort: a change of pace or emphasis or point of view, a remaining question if you’ve been offering answers, meaningful repetition containing slight change, a personal reference if you’ve only considered others, a memorable picture or story, a meditative summary.

Step 7: Title

Give your essay an interesting, original title.

Step 8: Classification Essay Examples (follow the links below for three examples)

http://acadweb.jbu.edu/EGL1013/Student%20Example%20Essays/Classification%20Essay/Heidi%20Propst%20-%20The%20Beauty%20of%20Running.doc

http://acadweb.jbu.edu/EGL1013/Student%20Essays/Classification/Joe%20Levey%20-%20Classification.doc

http://acadweb.jbu.edu/EGL1013/Example%20Essays/Classification%20Essay/Mandy%20Boydston%20'Be%20All%20You%20Can%20Be%20in%20the%20Amusement%20Park'.DOC

Important Mechanics Warning

In this essay you will be using type labels and likely referring to a type of person as doing particular activities or looking a certain way. As always in English, you will have the problem of deciding what pronoun to use in referring to back this person once the singular antecedent has been established. They and its possessive and objective forms their and them are singular pronouns and cannot, of course, be used to refer back to nouns that are singular, although we typically do this in colloquial English when referring back to a singular noun denoting a human being whose gender is not specified. The agreement problem may be solved by pluralizing the antecedent, but this requires a constant awareness and conscious effort to correct the errors, and the results are even so sometimes more awkward sounding than we would like. If it works with your topic, consider specifying the gender of a certain type by telling, early in a body paragraph, that the type you are talking about is typically a teenage boy or a middle-aged woman and then using the pronouns appropriate to that gender. Also, if you are talking about roommates or team members, you might consider making clear from the start that you are male or that you compete on a women's swim team, so that you can resolve the gender problem right from the start. In any case, be aware that pronoun/antecedent agreement errors are particularly likely on this assignment.

(Taken from Ms. Patty Kirk, JBU.)