• Order
  • BHR
  • Offers
  • Support
    • Due to unforeseen circumstances, our phone line will be unavailable from 5pm to 9pm GMT on Thursday, 28th March. Please be assured that orders will continue to be processed as usual during this period. For any queries, you can still contact us through your customer portal, where our team will be ready to assist you.

      March 28, 2024

  • Sign In

Disclaimer: This work was produced by one of our academic writers to help university students with their studies.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UKEssays.com.

Writing a Classification Essay

Info: 366 words (1 pages) Study Guide
Published: 13th May 2020

Reference this

Definition:

“The purpose of a classification essay is to organise things into categories. This is done by putting useful categories in place following a single underlying principle and finding examples that fit into each category.”

Before beginning to write a classification essay, the writer must decide on what organisational principle is to be employed i.e. on what basis things are to be sorted. The thesis statement of a classification essay should state the topic, how it is to be categorised and give a brief example of how this will work. This can be a simple statement like: ‘students entering institutes of higher education to study for a degree can choose from colleges or universities’. This tells the reader the topic to be discussed (studying for a degree at an institute of higher education) and the method and type of classifications (colleges and universities).

Categories must be thoroughly researched to avoid omissions, otherwise the evidence and classification would be incomplete. For example, the statement used above needs to be kept specific as a means of categorisation because there are many ways to study for a degree other than by attending an ‘institute of higher education’, for example by distance or online learning. Ensure that you adhere to the stated organisational principle throughout and support each category with a roughly equal number of categories as this provides a feeling of balance.

The actual structure of an organisational essay need not differ greatly from the standard essay except that the introduction will include a very specific thesis statement and organisational principle which must be maintained throughout. Subsequent paragraphs will still need to be linked by means of ‘hooks’ but the subject of each paragraph will be determined by the examination of a category rather than developing a process of thought on a topic. Similarly, the conclusion will differ slightly by being less a summation and more of a directive towards additional and/or subsequent categorisation via a different organisational principle or a development of the one outlined in the current essay.

Cite This Work

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing stye below:

Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.

Related Services

View all