Definition:
A method of paragraph or essay development in which a writer arranges people, objects, or ideas with shared characteristics into classes or groups. See also:
- 50 Writing Topics: Classification
- Classification in Richard Ford's Independence Day
- Draft Classification Essay
- A Classification Essay (Revised)
- Revision and Editing Checklist for a Classification Essay
- E.B. White's New York
- "Of Studies," by Francis Bacon
- "Conversation," by Samuel Johnson
Examples and Observations:
- "Each of Jamaica's four great gardens, although established along similar principles, has acquired its own distinctive aura. Hope Gardens, in the heart of Kingston, evokes postcard pictures from the 1950s of public parks, gracious and vaguely suburban and filled with familiar favorites--lantana and marigolds--as well as exotics. Bath has retained its Old World character; it is the easiest to conjure as it must have looked in Bligh's time. Cinchona of the clouds is otherworldly. And Castleton, the garden established to replace Bath, fleetingly evokes that golden age of Jamaican tourism, when visitors arrived in their own yachts--the era of Ian Fleming and Noel Coward, before commercial air travel unloaded ordinary mortals all over the island."
(Caroline Alexander, "Captain Bligh's Cursed Breadfruit." The Smithsonian, Sep. 2009) - "The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; (5) those who know and distinguish."
(H.W. Fowler and Ernest Gowers, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd ed. Oxford Univ. Press, 1965)
Pronunciation: KLASS-eh-fi-KAY-shun
