Objective
To discover how to use questioning techniques to narrow and organize a subject.
Writing to Narrow a Subject
Classification is often a brainstorming technique that helps writers think of a focused subject for writing before they ever begin to construct a paragraph or essay. It can also be used as a writing exercise for sorting people, places, ideas, or things, from large groups into smaller ones based on common traits called classes.
As a writing tool, it can be used early in an essay or other piece of writing to focus the reader on a little part of a large group by dividing a subject into principles and then exploring the principles using classes of information. Here is an example of this pattern:
Subject: Television Shows
Principle: Saturday Morning
Classes: Cartoons, News, Sports, Infomercials
To use another example, we might write about things to do on a family vacation (subject) for less than $1000 (principle), such as camping, travel to an amusement park, or a week at the beach. (classes).
Exercise: Use the text box below to practice this first step of finding classes using cars, schools, or even candy bars as subjects.
Hint: It is easy to "overlap" ideas by including things that don't really fit into your classes. When you decide something is a class, ask yourself if the idea has any characteristics that make it different. For instance, if you were going to write about clothing, your classes might include coats, pants, shirts, sweaters, and socks, but expensive would not be a class. How is expensive different? Can you wear all the kinds of clothing? Can you wear expensive?
Using the Classification Tool as Part of an Argumentative Essay
In a paragraph, you need to construct an introductory sentence that defines your subject, the principle you will use to sort it out, and the classes that you think the thing falls into. Your topic sentence would define the subject and the principle. Here are some ideas:
- Saturday morning television shows represent some unhealthy stereotypes about American viewers.
- Saturday morning television shows reflect the American character.
- Saturday morning television shows appeal to people who have no life.
- Saturday morning television shows give families something to do while they are cleaning their house.
Now, some of those are silly, but all of them would work. Most paragraphs have eight to ten sentences in them, and that will work well for the four classes that we described about Saturday morning television. For each class, you could write a sentence defining the class and then a sentence that contains an example. For instance, if we chose to write about how to watch Saturday morning TV while cleaning the house, my first class might be cartoons, and here is an example of what we might write:
On most network channels, between 6 AM and 10 AM, the network programmers schedule cartoons. Sitting the children in front of the TV while Mom cleans up their bedrooms and Dad mows the lawn is almost an American tradition.
Exercise: In this space, you can practice writing a two-sentence combination using one of the classes you identified in your examples above:
Our paragraph would continue in a pattern of class then example until all the classes we identified are explored. Then, we would write a single summary sentence at the end which reviewed the original idea, probably something like: "Saturday morning television may not be fascinating for everyone, but it serves the purposes of most American families."
Writing a Classification Paragraph or Essay
Writing a classification essay, of course, will require that you use more detail. In a classification essay, you will want to stay consistent by exploring similar characteristics in each of the classes you choose to write about. To do this you will identify some sub-classes. In this case a questioning technique will help you. Ask yourself what ideas are common about your classes:
- Who would be most likely to use the thing you are classifying?
- What would they use it for?
- Where would they use it?
- When is the most likely time they would use it?
- Why is the object attractive to them?
- How would they use it?
Of course these could be modified a bit to fit whatever you have decided to classify. While cost or size would not be an issue for classifying television shows, it might be important if you are classifying cars or other large or expensive objects. So, in addition to asking these standard kinds of questions you might add
- How much does it cost?
- How big is it?
If you are writing about an idea or emotion, other questions might be more appropriate:
- How does it make people feel?
- Who is affected by it?
The answers to these questions become the sub-classes that you can use to illustrate your paragraphs, and they can be used in any combination - as long as you use the same ones as you explore each class in your paper. You probably should not use different sub-classes to explore each class, so decide which three or four fit your purpose and use them consistently in your paper.
Let's go back to the idea of classifying Saturday morning television, and see how this would work in a paragraph or essay. For this example, we will use a simple outline.
- Introductory paragraph
- defines subject and principle
- develops the readers interest
- presents a thesis.
- Body Paragraph 1
- defines the class, i.e. cartoons, and an opinion about them (class)
- describes who would watch them (sub-class1)
- gives an example of those people watching them
- describes why they would watch them (sub-class 2)
- gives an example of people watching cartoons
- describes why they like them (sub-class 3)
- gives an example of likeable things
- summary or transitional sentence to the next class I want to discuss
You should use this same set of sub-classes in the other body paragraphs as you discuss each class you identified. In the conclusion you would sum up your ideas and return to your thesis idea.
Summary
Classification is an important idea for almost all writing because it helps writers sort ideas into some organized pattern. You might use it in all kinds of writing to develop your ideas, sometimes called brainstorming, or to help readers follow your thinking.
Often, classification of subject, principle, and classes is used in introductory paragraphs of other kinds of writing. You may have heard an instructor say that introductions need to begin with a broad subject and narrow to your thesis. What he or she means is to use the principles of classification: start with the big idea (subject), describe what you think is interesting about it (principles), and propose your thesis (class).
When you work with classification, you need to remember the four sorting principles: subject, principle, class, and sub-class. Almost everything in the world can be divided using these ideas. You can divide your work using the four steps discussed here:
- Identify the subject you want to write about (subject)
- Decide what part of the subject is interesting to you (principle)
- Divide the subject into parts using the principle (classes)
- Explore the classes you chose using sub-class questions
Hint: When you are writing a paper, remember that it is not enough to just identify the classes. It is important to explore the ideas using the sub-topics and provide examples to help readers understand exactly what you mean.
  
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