A form of expository writing in which the writer separates a subject into its elements or parts.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "loosen"Example:
"Some music players contain a tiny hard drive, offering huge capacity. Others store music on memory chips, which permit a much more compact design. (This type is known as a flash-memory player, or flash for short.)
"What's so clever about the iPod Nano is that it merges these two approaches. It contains memory chips, so it's dazzlingly tiny--3.5 by 1.6 by 0.27 inches, to be exact, about the size of a folded playing card and thin enough to slip under a door. Yet because Apple stuffed it with four gigabytes of memory, it holds as much music as some hard-drive players--more than 1,000 songs. (Apple also offers a $199 model with half the capacity.) Because it contains no moving parts, the Nano is less delicate than full-size iPods and virtually skip-proof.
"To sweeten the deal, Apple endowed the Nano with a sharp color screen (176 by 132 pixels, 1.5 inches diagonal), the better to show off album-cover art, your photo collection and the iPod's famously clean menu system. The Nano even has room for a click wheel, the scrolling device that makes iPod navigation simple even when you're hunting for a musical needle in a haystack of albums.
"The resulting slab is sweet, small and shiny, a comfortable fit in the middle third of your palm. It weighs so little (1.5 ounces), you don't have to worry about dropping it onto pavement; even if it flies from your hands, the earbud cord catches it like a leash. Once again, Apple has mastered a lesson that its rivals seem unable to absorb: that the three most important features in a personal music player are style, style and style."
(David Pogue, "IPod's Law: The Impossible Is Possible," The New York Times, September 15, 2005)
