WHAT IS CLASSIFICATION AND DIVISION?

 Division is the process of breaking a whole into parts; classification is the act of sorting individual items into categories. In the following paragraph from "Fans," Paul Gallico divides sports fans into categories based on the different sports they watch.

Parts: Kinds of sports fans

    Through classification and division, we can make sense of seemingly random ideas by putting scattered bits of information into useful, coherent order. By breaking a large group into smaller categories and bringing separate items together into particular categories, we are able to identify relationships between the whole and its parts and to recognize similarities and differences among the parts themselves. (Remember, though, that simply enumerating representative examples does not constitute classification; when you classify, you always sort individual examples into categories according to some grouping principle.)

    In countless practical situations classification and division brings order to chaos. Items in a Sunday newspaper are classified in clearly defined sections-international news, sports, travel, entertainment, comics, and so on-so that hockey scores, for example, are not mixed up with real estate listings. Similarly, department stores are divided into different departments so that managers can assign merchandise to particular areas and shoppers can know where to look for a particular item. Without such organization, an item might be anywhere in a store. Thus, order is brought to newspapers and department stores-and to supermarkets, biological hierarchies, and libraries-when a whole is divided into categories or sections and individual items are assigned to one or another of these subgroups.
    The interrelated processes of classification and division invariably occur together; nevertheless, they are two separate operations. When you classify, you begin with individual items and sort them into categories. Most things have several different attributes, and so they can be classified in any of several different ways. Take as an example the students who attend your school. The most obvious way to classify these individuals might be according to their year in college-fresh- man, sophomore, junior, or senior. But you could also classify students according to their major, racial or ethnic background, home state, grade point average, political affiliation, or any number of other principles. The principle of classification you choose would depend on how you wished to approach the members of this large and diverse group.
    Division is the opposite of classification. When you divide, you start with a whole (an entire class) that you break into its individual parts-smaller, more specific classes, called subclasses. For example, you might start with the large general class television shows and divide it into smaller subclasses: comedy, drama, action/adventure, and so forth. You could divide each of these subclasses still further-- action/adventure programs, for example, might include westerns, police shows, and so on--and each of these subclasses could be further divided as well. Eventually you would need to determine a particular principle to help you assign specific programs to one category or another--that is, to classify them.

 Guidelines for Classification and Division

Three guidelines can help ensure proper division and classification:
1. All the categories should result from the same Principle. If you decide to divide television shows into soap operas, police shows, and the like, it is not logical to include the subclass children's programs, for this subclass results from one principle--target audience--while the others result from another principle-- genre. Similarly, if you are classifying undergraduates at your school according to their year, you cannot include the subclass students receiving financial aid.

2. All of the subclasses should be on the same level. In the series comedy, drama, action/adventure, and westerns, the last of these items, westerns, does not belong because it is on a lower level--that is, it is a subclass of action/adventure. Likewise, sophomores (a subclass of undergraduates) does not belong in the series undergraduates, graduate students, extension students.

3.  You should treat all subclasses that are significant and relevant to your discussion and include enough subclasses to make your point, with no important omissions and no overlapping categories. In a review of a network's fall television lineup, the series sitcoms, soap operas, police shows, and detective shows is incomplete because it omits important subclasses like news programs, game shows, talk shows, and documentaries; moreover, detective shows may overlap with police shows. In the same way, the series freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and transfers is also illogical: The important group seniors has been omitted, while transfers may include freshmen, sophomores, and juniors.

Because of the way they are worded, certain topics and questions immediately suggest you use a classification-and-division pattern to structure your essay. Suppose, for example, you are asked, "What kinds of policies can be used to direct and control the national economy?" Here the word kinds suggests classification and division. Other words, such as types, varieties, and categories, can also serve as clues.

 Structuring a Classification-and-Division Essay

 Once you decide to use classification and division as your pattern of development, you need to plan your essay. Before you begin, you must decide what principle of classification you are going to use- what quality you regard your items as having in common. Your system must be logical and consistent. Just as a clear basis of comparison determines the points in a comparison-and-contrast essay, so a clear principle of classification determines the system you use to categorize items. Every group of people, things, or ideas can be categorized in many ways. When you are at the bookstore with only twenty dollars, the cost of different books may be the only principle by which you select them. As you decide which books to carry across campus, however, weight may matter more. Finally, as you study and read, the quality of the books should determine which ones you concentrate on. Similarly, when you organize an essay, your principle of classification and division is determined by your writing situation--your assignment, your purpose, your audience, and your special knowledge and interests.

Selecting and Arranging Categories

 Once you define your principle and apply it to your topic, you must select your categories by dividing a whole class into parts and grouping a number of different items together within each part. Next, you should decide how you will treat the categories in your essay. Just as a comparison-and-contrast essay makes comparable points about its subjects, so your classification-and-division essay should treat all categories similarly. When you discuss comparable points for each, you ensure that your readers see your distinctions among categories and understand your definition of each category. Finally, you should arrange your categories in some logical order, preferably so that one leads to the next and the least important to the most important. Such an order ensures that your readers see how the categories are related and how significant each is. Whatever this order, it should be consistent with your purpose and support your thesis.

Formulating a Thesis

 Like other essays, a classification-and-division essay must have a thesis. This thesis should identify your subject, enumerate the categories you will discuss, and perhaps show readers the relationships of your categories to one another and to the subject as a whole. In addition, your thesis should convince your readers why your categories are significant or establish their relative value. Listing different kinds of investments would be pointless if you did not evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each and then make recommendations based on your assessment. Similarly, a term paper about a writer's major works would accomplish little if it merely categorized his or her writings. Instead, your thesis should communicate your evaluation of these works to your readers, perhaps demonstrating that some deserve higher public regard than others.

Planning and Organizing Your Essay

 Once you have formulated your essay's main idea and established your subclasses, you should plan your classification-and-division essay around the same three major sections that other essays have: introduction, body, and conclusion. Your introduction should orient your readers by mentioning your topic, the principle by which your material is divided and classified, and the individual subclasses you plan to discuss. Your paper's thesis should also usually be stated in the introduction. Once your readers have this information, they can easily follow your paper as it develops. In the subsequent body paragraphs, you should treat the categories one by one in the order in which your introduction presents them. Finally, your conclusion should restate your thesis, summing up the points you have made, and then perhaps move on to consider their implications.
 Suppose that you are preparing a term paper on Mark Twain's nonfiction works for an American literature course. You have read Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, and The Innocents Abroad. Besides these travel narratives, you have read Twain's autobiography as well as some of his correspondence and essays. When you realize that the works you have studied can easily be classified as four different types of Twain's nonfiction-travel narratives, essays, letters, and autobiography-you decide to use classification and division to structure your essay. Therefore, you first divide the large class Twain's nonfiction prose into major subclasses--his travel narratives, essays, autobiography, and letters. Then you go on to classify the individual works--that is, to assign the works you plan to dis- cuss to these subclasses, which you plan to discuss one at a time. Your categories make sense to you as a way to organize your paper,
but you know that you also need a strong thesis statement so that your paper does more than just list various works. You decide that your purpose is to persuade readers to reconsider the reputations of some of these works, and you formulate your thesis accordingly. You might then prepare a formal outline like this one for the body of your paper:

Thesis statement:   Most readers know Mark Twain as a writer of novels such as Huckleberry Finn, but his nonfiction works--his travel narratives, his essays, his letters, and especially his autobiography--deserve more attention.

I. Travel narratives
 A. Roughing It
 B. The Innocents Abroad
 C. Life on the Mississippi
II. Essays
 A. "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
 B. "How To Tell A Story"
 C. "The Awful German Language"
III. Letters
 A. To W. D. Howells
 B. To his family
IV. Autobiography

Because this will be a long term paper, each of the outline's divisions will have several subdivisions, and each subdivision might require several paragraphs.

 This outline illustrates each of the characteristics of an effective classification-and-division essay. To begin with, Twain's nonfiction works are classified according to a single principle of classification- literary genre. Depending on your purpose, of course, another principle--for example, theme, subject matter, stage in Twain's career, or contemporary critical reception--could have worked just as well. If you had written your term paper for a political science course, for example, you might have decided to examine Twain as a social critic by classifying his works according to the amount or kind of political commentary in each. Literary genre, however, is an appropriate principle of classification for the writing situation at hand. (If you had arranged Twain's works into novels, essays, short stories, letters, and political works, you would have mixed two principles of classification-genre and content. As a result, a highly political novel like The Gilded Age would have fit more than one category.) In addition to being derived from a single principle of classification, all the paper's subclasses are on the same level (you could not, for example, treat Twain's essays, letters, autobiography, and Roughing It as your four major divisions). And all relevant subclasses are included. Had you left out the subclass essays, for example, you would have been unable to classify several significant works of nonfiction.
Note too that this outline arranges the four subclasses so they will support your thesis most effectively. Because you believe Twain's travel narratives, though familiar to many readers, are somewhat overrated, you plan to discuss them early in your paper. Similarly, because you think the autobiography would make your best case for the merit of the nonfiction works as a whole, you decide it would be most effective placed last. Of course, you could have arranged your categories in several other orders, such as shorter to longer works or least to most popular, depending on the details of your argument.
 Finally, this outline helps guide you to treat all of your categories comparably in your paper. In fact, you should go on to verify this consistency by identifying each main point in your rough draft and cross-checking the order of points from category to category. Your case would be weakened if, for example, you inadvertently skipped style in your discussion of Twain's letters while including it for every other category. This omission might lead your readers to suspect either that you could not discuss this point because you had not done enough research on the letters or that you had ignored the point because the style of Twain's letters did not measure up somehow to the style of his other works.

Taken from Patterns for College Writing. 6th Ed. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. New York: St. Martin's, 1995. 413-419.