What is Classification in Grammar?

In rhetoric and composition, classification is a method of paragraph or essay development in which a writer arranges people, objects, or ideas with shared characteristics into classes or groups. A classification essay often includes examples and other supporting details that are organized according to types, kinds, segments, categories, or parts of a whole.

Observations on Classification

"The primary support in classification consists of the categories that serve the purpose of the classification...The categories in classification are the 'piles' into which the writer sorts a topic (the items to be classified). These categories will become the topic sentences for the body paragraphs of the essay...The supporting details in classification are examples or explanations of what is in each category. The examples in classification are the various items that fall within each category. These are important because readers may not be familiar with your categories."—From "Real Essays With Readings" by Susan Anker

Using Classification in an Introductory Paragraph

"Americans can be divided into three groups—smokers, nonsmokers and that expanding pack of us who have quit. Those who have never smoked don't know what they're missing, but former smokers, ex-smokers, reformed smokers can never forget. We are veterans of a personal war, linked by that watershed experience of ceasing to smoke and by the temptation to have just one more cigarette. For almost all of us ex-smokers, smoking continues to play an important role in our lives. And now that it is being restricted in restaurants around the country and will be banned in almost all indoor public places in New York State starting next month, it is vital that everyone understand the different emotional states cessation of smoking can cause. I have observed four of them; and in the interest of science I have classified them as those of the zealot, the evangelist, the elect and the serene. Each day, each category gains new recruits."—From "Confessions of an Ex-Smoker" by Franklin Zimring

Read More

What Is an English Grammatical Category?

By Richard Nordquist

Using Classification to Establish Place

"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."—From "Captain Bligh's Cursed Breadfruit" by Caroline Alexander

Using Classification to Establish Character: Example 1

"Local TV interviewers come in two varieties. One is a bulimic blond person with a deviated septum and a severe cognitive disorder who went into broadcasting because he or she was too emotionally disturbed for telephone sales work. The other variety is suave, sagacious, grossly overqualified for the job, and too depressed to talk to you. Good local TV people are always depressed because their field is so crowded."—From "Book Tour" by P.J. O'Rourke

Using Classification to Establish Character: Example 2

"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."—From "A Dictionary of Modern Usage" by H.W. Fowler and Ernest Gowers

Famous Classification Paragraphs and Essays for Study

• "Conversation" by Samuel Johnson
• "Here is New York" by E.B. White
• "Give Her a Pattern" by D.H. Lawrence
• "The Man Who Interrupts" by Bill Nye
• "Of Studies" by Francis Bacon
• "On Various Kinds of Thinking" by James Harvey Robinson
• "The Pleasure of Quarreling" by H.G. Wells
• "Shaking Hands" by Edward Everett

Sources

• Anker, Susan. "Real Essays With Readings," Third Edition. Bedford/St. Martin's. 2009
• Zimring, Franklin. "Confessions of an Ex-Smoker." Newsweek. April 20, 1987
• Alexander, Caroline. "Captain Bligh's Cursed Breadfruit." The Smithsonian. September 2009
• O'Rourke, P.J. "Book Tour," in "Age and Guile, Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut." Atlantic Monthly Press. 1995
• Fowler, H.W.; Gowers, Ernest. "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage," Second Edition. Oxford University Press. 1965