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essay two: classification

description

• For your second assignment, you will write a 4-6 page essay that classifies your chosen theme. To do so, isolate and describe 4-7 categories of your theme
  • If you have chosen football as your theme, you could classify types of football players, types of fans, types of plays, types of hits or tackles, types of stadiums, or types of teams. You could classify different types of football teams, in essence showing us the variety of teams, such as pick-up teams (informal games), “little league” football (Pop Warner), high school football, college football, and pro football.
  • If you have chosen friends, you could classify types of friends by the types of television shows they watch, the way they support their friends (by talking? by doing? by sympathizing? by energizing?), by their favorite hobbies, or by a group of friends on television or the movies (I have had Sex and the City and Grey’s Anatomy papers like that).
  • If you have chosen pizza, you can divide pizzas by the types of people who order them or by the types of moods they generate. Or you could classify the delivery folks who get them to you or classify the types of pizza restaurants. Or you could classify the many venues in which pizza is made (home, mall food court, general restaurant, Italian restaurant, pizza joint).
• To write a classification essay, you must choose two elements: what you will classify (that’s your theme, and you probably already know it) and what guiding principle by which you will divide your topic.
  • For example, you could classify television hospital dramas by their “age” (began in the 1980s? 1990s? 2000s? since 2006?), by the ratio between hospital drama and personal drama (mostly about injuries? some interest in the doctors and other personnel? lots of interest in the doctors? only interested in the doctors?), by their technical accuracy, or by their target audience (high school? college age? twentysomethings? thirtysomethings? mature adults? seniors?).
  • You could classify teams by the fans they have (indifferent? insincere? rabid? cult-like?), by their owners or by their coaches (happy-go-lucky? angry? passive-aggressive? ready-to-have-a-heart-attack?), by their uniforms, by their stadiums, by their win-loss record, by their favorite plays, by their strengths, by their weaknesses.
• Whatever guiding principle you choose, make sure that it will reveal something significant and new about your theme. Classifying teams by their weaknesses might make some great football teams look worse or might make you realize that you’ve been ignoring some key players. Perhaps classifying hospital dramas by their audiences may make you realize that each type of hospital drama makes different types of fantasies come true for the watchers. Or maybe classifying pizzas by the types of restaurants they come from will make you realize that you should avoid all national purveyors of pizza and instead stick to the small, hole-in-the-wall, relatively unknown restaurants.

goals

• 1. Create an interesting, unique system of classification. NEW! UNEXPECTED!
• 2. Use lively, engaging, descriptive language to create a fun, easy-to-read essay. (Not about “sounding smart,” but about creating an enjoyable reading experience. Think: magazine essay.)
• 3. Use this classification to argue a specific thesis.
  • In other words, what purpose underlies your classification? What do you want people to learn from your essay? What did your classification reveal about the world around you?
  • Perform social critique: ask yourself, WHY should we act this way? Why do we? Should we stop doing it?

watch out for…

• Inconsistent Classification: your categories must be consistent, complete, and exclusive.
  • Consistent: all categories need to use the same guiding principle
  • Complete: all potential examples have a home in a specific category (Steelers as well as the Cardinals! General Hospital as well as House!)
  • Exclusive: no single example (no single football team, hospital drama, or friend) should fit into more than one category)
    • One Example = One Category ONLY
• Boring Paragraph Patterns
  • Each paragraph should have its own, special structure. If you define your category in the first sentence of one paragraph, the next paragraph should begin with a quotation, an example, or a cultural allusion. If you end one paragraph with an interesting piece of dialog, don’t end the paragraphs next to it in the same fashion.
• Stereotyping: classification is a form of stylization. In other words, classification does involve making rough, imprecise sketches of your categories, which can make stereotypes an easy choice for your essay (ie, you might accidentally reproduce mean, prejudicial assumptions about a group of people).
  • To avoid stereotyping, a) choose really interesting, unexpected details to share about your category, b) make sure you are not just reproducing the prejudices of the culture around you, and c) ask yourself if your writing shows an aggressive, deprecatory, or just plain mean attitude towards a group of people.

• Variety
• Entertainment
• Critique