9.1: Establishing Purpose for a Division and Classification Essay

Think about your fellow students in your English Composition class. Collectively, of course, you can say one thing about them: you all are students taking an English class. But as you mentally survey the room you occupy with them, you know you could categorize them in many more ways than that. How old are they? What towns do they live in? What is their socioeconomic status? Do they have spouses? Children? What are their ethnicities? What are their majors? What are their academic goals once they leave Butler? And on and on. Each of these ways of thinking about the same group of students leads to our being able to say something specific and precise about them as members of a smaller set within that larger group. We call this kind of sorting classification.

Division is a little different: it takes one big category or item and segments it into its component parts. In this chapter’s discussion of compare/contrast papers, we used the example of “cars and trucks” to illustrate how we might organize such papers; a division paper, though, would take either cars or trucks and discuss them in terms of their component parts: engine, brakes, wheels, frame, etc. Or, consider how you learned about the human body: very likely, your biology classes focused on its different systems (circulatory, nervous, respiratory, skeletal, etc.). In literature classes, you may have talked about the narrative structure of most stories (exposition, initial action, rising action, climax, dénouement (or falling action), and conclusion) or., perhaps, its component parts (character, setting, symbol, theme, etc.). By dividing these larger items into parts, we can examine each part individually and see how it functions in the larger whole. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be a very different novel if not for its setting of the Mississippi River. How do the respiratory and circulatory systems interact? How do the body paragraphs of an essay complement the introduction?

Division and classification provide a very structured way of looking at the world—and much of your everyday world is already organized in these structured ways. Whether you are dealing with one big thing, such as a grocery store, or many individual things, like the produce section within that same grocery store; or whether you’re looking at a really important thing, like the human body, or one individual thing and what it does, like the brain, division and classification are tools that help you find your way around that store and, for that matter, just about any other subject you will encounter.

It’s best to choose topics that you know well when writing classification essays. The more you know about a topic, the more you can break it into smaller, more interesting parts. Adding interest and insight will enhance your classification essays.

Application of Classification and Division

Like the examples above, the academic, practical, and workforce application should be apparent. Companies large and small rely on division and classification to manage tasks, projects, and assignments. Even something like a small donut shop is a ballet of interwoven systems: managing employees, ordering supplies, ensuring health codes are upheld, paying utility bills, taxes, advertising, and marketing, and customer service issues. And all of this before making even one donut. Now add on another location or two or three and the web of systems just gets larger and larger. Without the ability to break these interworking systems into manageable parts, many businesses, large and small, spiral out of control.