Tips for Writing a Classification Essay

Tips for Writing a Classification Essay Tips for Writing a Classification Essay A classification essay sorts details into categories using a single organizing principle. Each category provides examples and research to support your thesis. Writing an Effective Classification Essay Select your categories and make sure to examine the full breadth of the topic. Be thorough and include every important category, but don’t overdo it (i.e. adding categories that are not germane or pertinent to your subject). Use a single organizing principle to classify. Then sort your groups. Provide examples. Plan to provide the same number of examples for each category. Save your most important category for last, and, if necessary, give additional information for that one. When writing your classification essay, select resources with recently-published (within the last seven years) research. You might occasionally stumble on a resource providing timeless information on your subject, but be selective. An Example: Globalization Say you wish to write a classification essay on the topic of globalization. Read and cite studies published in peer-reviewed journals, and consider providing the following categories in your essay: Globalization’s impact on world aid and trade policies Expanded job opportunities (especially for women) due to globalization How globalization has impacted your country Current events throughout the world can also provide information related to globalization. An article about the World Bank providing financial assistance to Mexico with the goal of reducing ozone could be a good example. If you need assistance with any classification essay, please contact today at 1-800-573-0840. We are here to help you with your every academic need.

Definition and Examples of Academic Prose Styles

Definition and Examples of Academic Prose Styles Academese is an informal, pejorative term for the specialized language (or jargon) used in some scholarly writing and speech. Bryan Garner notes that academese is characteristic of academicians who are writing for a highly specialized but limited audience, or who have a limited grasp of how to make their arguments clearly and succinctly (Garners Modern American Usage, 2016). The Tameri Guide for Writers  defines academese as an artificial form of communication commonly used in institutes of higher education designed to make small, irrelevant ideas appear important and original. Proficiency in academese is achieved when you begin inventing your own words and no one can understand what you are writing. Examples and Observations Dale was not a good writer. Trust me on this. . . . [I]n training to be an academic, Dale was crippled by the need to write in academese. It is not a language formed by any human tongue, and few, if any, academics survive the degradation of it to move on to actual prose.(Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting. William Morrow, 2002)There is original thought here, but the reader is immediately confronted by the language academics apparently use to communicate with one another. Sometimes it reads like a translation from the German, at others that they are merely trying to impress or indulging in a verbal cutting contest. Here are a few of the words you should be prepared to encounter: hermeneutics, commodified, contextualizing, conceptualize, hyperanimacy, taxonomic, metacritical, rhizome, perspectivizing, nomadology, indexical, polysemy, auratic, reification, metonymic, synecdoche, biodegradability, interstitial, valorize, diegetic, allegoresis, grammatology, oracy, centripetality, and esempla stic.(Stanley Dance in a review of two anthologies of jazz studies; quoted by George E. Lewis in A Power Stronger Than Itself. University of Chicago Press, 2008) Vernacular Equivalents to Academese[E]ffective academic writing tends to be bilingual (or diglossial), making its point in Academese and then making it again in the vernacular, a repetition that, interestingly, alters the meaning. Here is an example of such bilingualism from a review of a book on evolutionary biology by a professor of ecology and evolution, Jerry A. Coyne. Coyne is explaining the theory that males are biologically wired to compete for females. Coyne makes his point both in Academese, which I italicize, and in the vernacular, staging a dialogue in the text between the writers (and the readers) academic self and his lay self: It is this internecine male competitiveness that is assumed to have driven not only the evolution of increased male body size (on average, bigger is better in a physical contest), but also of hormonally mediated male aggression (there is no use being the biggest guy on the block if you are a wallflower). It is this type of bridge discourse that en ables nonspecialists and students to cross from their lay discourse to academic discourse and back. . . .In providing a vernacular equivalent of their Academese, writers like Coyne install a self-checking device that forces them to make sure they are actually saying something. When we recast our point in vernacular terms, we do not simply throw out a sop to the nonspecialist reader, much less dumb ourselves down. Rather we let our point speak itself better than it knows, to come out of the closet in the voice of the skeptical reader.(Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. Yale University Press, 2003) If you cannot write about it so that anyone who buys the paper has a reasonable chance of understanding it, you dont understand it yourself.(Robert Zonka, quoted by Roger Ebert in Awake in the Dark. University of Chicago Press, 2006)Varieties of AcademeseCritics outside the academy tend to assume that academese is one thing, public discourse another. But in fact there are major differences of standards ranging from field to field: what constitutes evidence or valid argument, what questions are worth asking, what choices of style will work or even be understood, which authorities can be trusted, how much eloquence is permitted.(Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. Blackwell, 2004)Lionel Trilling on the Language of Non-ThoughtA specter haunts our cultureit is that people will eventually be unable to say, They fell in love and married, let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet, but will as a matter of course say Their libidinal imp ulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.Now this is not the language of abstract thought or of any kind of thought. It is the language of non-thought. . . . There can be no doubt whatever that it constitutes a threat to the emotions and thus to life itself.(Lionel Trilling, The Meaning of a Literary Idea. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, 1950) Passive Voice in AcademeseIf your style has been corrupted by long exposure to academese or business English, you may need to worry about the passive. Make sure it hasnt seeded itself where it doesnt belong. If it has, root it out as needed. Where it does belong, I think we ought to use it freely. It is one of the lovely versatilities of the verb.(Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft. Eighth Mountain Press, 1998) Pronunciation: a-KAD-a-MEEZ Also see: Academic WritingBafflegabGobbledygookLanguage at  -ese: Academese, Legalese, and Other Species of GobbledygookRegisterStyleUnder the Flapdoodle Tree: Doublespeak, Soft Language, and GobbledygookVerbiageVerbosity