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Students, especially the ones in high school and colleges are likely to be given assignments that involve classification essays as they move along in their studies. These assignments are necessary for professors because they use them to assess the student’s ability to categorize data based on specific properties. This might seem like a daunting academic writing task especially if you have never done this type of assignment before. However, once you learn how to write classification essays, you will discover it is not as bad as you previously thought.
If you receive a classification essay assignment inquiring you to classify computers, you need to put each of your developmental paragraphs in a manner that tells the traits of a different computer type. In other words, the groups that you classify must have unique identifying characteristics. This implies that classification essays utilize descriptions and examples as supporting details and evidence. The description gives the means of identifying the different characteristics while examples illustrate the item or members in its category. These essays use anecdotes or short narrative as supporting evidence to demonstrate class.
Before you can even learn how to write classification essays, it is only prudent of you to understand its definition first. This is one genre of writing which is a formal paper designed to demonstrate your skills in categorizing and generalization. You have to organize things into groups and provide examples that fit into each group. As the writer, you are the one to decide on the classification, but you ought to be ready to explain your reasoning.
When you are handling classification essay topics, you have to pay attention to the following elements in the paper:
- The set under the classification
- The scheme or standard of choice for classifying the set
- The classes where the sets belong to
The Set
When you are considering a setfor your classification, you need to ensure that they have similar characteristics. In other words, they must be distinguishable from the things that fall outside the set. For instance, in biology, living organisms are classified as a setwhereas non-living material falls outside the set. Students, vacation spots, pets, or other generic nouns can form a classified set.
The Scheme
Another element of classification essays is the scheme or principle of selection. This one follows the criteria of quality, standard type, or function when selecting the elements for each class. For instance in biology, the classification of living organisms pegs on the life process and qualities. In geology, rocks are set into ingenious, sedimentary, and metamorphic and this anchor on how the rock was formed. The effectiveness of a scheme of the principle of selection anchors on significance, relevance, or valuable way to understand the set of things being considered.
The Classes
Another element to consider when writing classification essays are the classes. When you are writing about the class, you start with the description of the descriptor, identification traits of a member of a class and separate them from other members of other classes. You then include the representative examples of that class. In the discussion of the class, you must evaluate the worth of this class or compare and contrast it with other classes within the scheme. For instance in biology, there are frequent references to the ways that make members of a specific class distinguishable from members of other classes.This is the reason why you will use the description in your classification essays as well as narration, definition, examples, comparison and contrast modes as methods in a classification.
So students often wonder why some assignments, classification essays are important. Remember that when it comes to assignment writing, some of them do not even want to do it in the first place. As such, it is good to explore the important stages of handling classification essays topics and how you can complete an essay without too many problems. The strategies include:
- Prewriting and purpose
It will take a very special and rare writer to sit down and come up with classification essays with our pre-writing stage. When handling classification essay topics, you need to prepare well before you start the actual writing process. You achieve this by preparing categories. This is where you group things differently and discover the categories that are more sensible for the intended purpose. Our need to identify ways through which things will be grouped. Make sure that the categories you create adhere to a single basis of classification and the groups are in tandem with the categories that you have created.
- You have to consider the classification essays topics and identify objects and categorization
- Think logically and identify the classification criteria
- Come up with a solid thesis statement that mentions your classification essays topic and the classification you have considered
- Describe all the categories and provide relevant examples
- As you enumerate the categories, you can use linking words like the first the second, third, group, type, class, and so on.
- Make your conclusion by restating the categories
The Introduction
Now that you have an idea of the important strategies of writing your classification essays, it is time to look at how you will organize your content. When writing the introduction to your essay, you have to lead the audience to the set you are classifying and how its significance, relevance or value of the scheme that you are applying. Your thesis statement is the perfect one to help in identifying very closely the classes that have been used in classifying the set. Structure of the introduction of your classification essays in a way that attracts the attention of the audience. This can be used with informative or descriptive details.
You have so many examples of classification essays on the internet that you can use to see how this is done. You have to structure your introduction paying attention to the classification essay topics that you are dealing with. Remember that the introduction of your classification essays must suggest the purpose of the whole classification essay. Your thesis statement must come at the end of your introduction.
The Body Paragraphs
Like other essays, classification essays also utilize body paragraphs. During the writing process, ensure that the body paragraphs of your classification essays discuss one idea at a time. In other words, they must identify the class under consideration and its relation to the principle of selection for creating classes. You are free to use more than one classification scheme when you are classifying the set. However, you must have a reason as to why you are classifying the set and what you stand to gain grow the principle of selection. Remember that you have to discuss each scheme used to classify the set.
The body paragraphs of your classification essays ought to be arranged in a manner that you feel is logical. The arrangement must conform to how you have structured your thesis statement.
The Conclusion
Like any other conclusion, the classification essays must conclude with the writer re-emphasizing the significance, relevance, or value of the scheme he has used to classify the set. Sometimes the conclusion comes in handy when you want to emphasize the most significant grouping. While you are organizing your classification essay draft, you can use different strategies. However, bear in mind the basic format where you have the introduction that identifies your subject, and the different approaches, three or more body paragraphs that have specific details about the description and illustration as well as a conclusion that sums up the points you have made. The conclusion should also clear the overall purpose of that classification.
For the sake of human nature, people will always make mistakes. Students are prone to making mistakes in their assignments, and it is only important to point out possible pitfalls that you are likely to make as they write classification essays. Handling classification essays topics require one to be very careful with the way he uses the set, the scheme, and the classes. During the writing process, this is what you need to pay attention to and avoid mistakes:
- Confusing modes
Most of the times, the student will often confuse classification essays with example essays. When handling classification essays topics, one must use examples that illustrate a class. The writer must have a defined class that is well explained from the onset and the incorporate examples given as an illustration of that class.
- Lack of support
For you to write effective classification essays, you must have identified a class that describes the unique traits of a class. Members of every group should only belong to a single class, and every class should have more than one member. Ensure that everybody paragraph discusses the class under consideration as the topic and how they fit into the principle of selection. The supporting sentences must describe the class itself or the members in that class. These sentences should also provide examples with that of the members that fit in the class or tell the stories that demonstrate the relationship of the members within their class.
- Using too many categories
This mistake happens when students are dealing with classification essays. Using too many categories interferes with the idea and the criteria for classification. Your essay is prone to turn into a simple listing and will not show your generalization skills. You need to consult your supervisor to understand more about this. More so, you can use the examples of classification essays to see an understand more on this.
- Using scarcer categories
The worst mistake a student will do while writing classification essaysare to use fewer categories. The culmination is the omission of an important type of object, thereby affecting the purpose of your classification essays.
- Lack of a Unified Criterion of Classification
If you lack a good governing principle of classification, your essay will not be clear enough. As such, the audience will not understand anything you are trying to put across.
- Using an Uneven Number of Examples in Your Essay
This is a common mistake that student often makes. When you use an uneven number of examples in your classification essays, you make other categories look less important
Language and Structural Mistakes
If you want to achieve success with your classification essays, you need to know how you can stricture it well. This should start at the sentence level as well as the paragraph level. You can classify mistakes here as to those that refer to the sentence structure and those that affect entire classification essays structure.
- Sentence structure
Run-on sentences and fragments are some of the common mistakes found in classification essays as well as in other essays. A fragment refers to an incomplete structure devoid of the subject-predicate unit. In other words, it does not properly express the idea regardless of beginning with a capital letter and ending with a punctuation mark. These fragments cannot function in text on their own but have to be added to complete a sentence. They can also be written in a way that is appropriate to the subject-predicate unit in them.
When it comes to the run-on sentence in classification essays, they consist of two subject-predicate units joined without a conjunction or proper punctuation. This will confuse the audience,and if you want to make sense, you have to create two separate sentences or add a conjunction.
- Text structure
This mistake is common in classification essays where there is poor paragraph coordination. Paragraphs here sound less important than that of ideas, but if you lack text structure, you will interfere with the meaning of the entire essay. The organization of classification essays must serve a purpose. In other words, the introduction, body paragraph, and the conclusion must be arranged in a manner that creates a good meaning. This way, your essay becomes easy to read.
Hitherto this moment, classification essays seemed a major threat, but now, you know about writing them.
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