College Instructors commonly use essay assignments as a means of testing students' understanding of material. It's done as a kind of game: the instructor asks a question to which she or he already knows the answer and expects the student to take on task of explaining. Outside of school we frequently find ourselves in the position of having to explain something to someone who may genuinely not know the facts. Essays that take on this explanatory function are called "expository" essays. Exposition is often seen as something different from argumentation, and there does at first seem to be a difference.
Yet a persuasive goal still exists, even in the most clearly informative essay. The writer must persuade the reader that the information presented is accurate and complete. There must be a degree of trust involved. This element of trust is dealt with in rhetoric under the heading of "Ethos"; it is basically an appeal to the character of the arguer. Generally there are three elements involved in gaining the trust of an audience that does not know you personally. You must appear to be well informed, clear thinking, and well intentioned.
The question of your intentions may not come up in college essays as often as it would in political speeches, but the other two issues, being well informed and clear thinking, are very important. Your instructor's whole purpose in assigning expository essays is to check your level of understanding and your clarity of thought.
Nothing creates an impression of good thinking as well as organization. Careful arrangement of ideas helps the reader understand and accept your claims.
Below are some very useful expository patterns that have helped many people present a wide range of material.
However, ONLY THE CLASSIFICATION ESSAY IS ASSIGNED.
The topic of your classification essay is up to you.
Analysis of whole/part (division)
It may be helpful to think of this type of analysis as "dissection," taking a thing apart in a methodical manner. What are the parts of the U.S. government? of an automobile engine? of the human brain? of an oxygen atom? Also consider that some parts may be further divided. For example, there are three parts or branches of the U.S. government, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, but the legislative is further divided into two parts: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The judicial branch consists of a Supreme Court and other federal courts.
Instructors often test your understanding of a thing by asking you to break it down and explain it in an essay. Obviously you have to know the subject, but you must also be able to communicate that knowledge in a clear way.
Be sure to follow a clear outline using an introduction and conclusion with all the "parts" set in the body in an orderly fashion.
Analysis of classes (classification)
Sorting and labeling seems to be a fundamental human thought process. It's almost the basic element of language itself. As children we learn relationships as we learn language. We learn to separate living things in to plants and animals. We learn different kinds of animals: nice pets and scary things. Later we fill in gaps and learn there are lots of "kinds": birds, dogs, cats, cows. Dogs in general become spaniels and shepherds and poodles, etc. Although we don't really learn it all from the top down, eventually we see a kind of "ladder" of specificity, with "living things" (very general term) at the top and "Ralph," the black Lab that lives in the neighbor's back yard at the bottom (a specific living thing). If we continue to observe and draw finer distinctions among living things, we become biologists. Apply the same principle to the stars and you enter astronomy. Every new class you take requires learning the names and categories involved in that subject.
Beyond academic fields, systems of classification order our whole world. Filing cabinets, dictionaries, sales catalogs, zip codes, grocery stores—everywhere humans live and work they are busy sorting and labeling.
On a philosophical level, of course, there's something a bit artificial about most of it. Our categories are largely a matter of convenience rather than reflections of reality. In one classification system Ralph, the dog mentioned above, is a canine, one type of invertebrate mammal. In another system, economic, he's a protector of private property, an economic asset. In some other systems he may be lunch or a symbol of a god or a good friend.
Such systems are built around some "principle of classification." This idea may, perhaps, be understood by imagining a group of people. How shall we sort and label them? Ethnic background, religious affiliation, age groups, political ideology, hobbies, color of clothing, income brackets—almost anything can be a principle of classification, depending on the purpose we have in mind. This last point is important. Remember, you classify things for a reason, not just because you can. Your goal, as far as essay writing is concerned, is to make a point, to argue a claim.
One common error is classification essays is "cross ranking." Imagine the group of people just mentioned. Suppose you wanted to make some argument about educational achievement being related (or not being related) to income bracket. You decide to divide your group into upper class, middle class, and Methodists. Clearly the last group doesn't fit the principle of classification you have laid out for yourself, and it probably includes members from the other groups. While this example makes cross ranking obvious, often the problem can be very subtle.
Because the classification essay is a type of analysis, clarity is vital. Make sure that your principle of classification is clear. Usually it's best to name your classes before you go into them in depth, especially if the essay is going to be longer than a few hundred words. The body of the essay will probably be divided into sections reflecting each category.
Analysis of a process
A process analysis essay is instructional, explaining "how to do it." It may explain how something is made (chocolate chip cookies, gasoline, an integrated circuit) or how something is done (washing a car, selling real estate, calculating geographic position by celestial navigation).
The key here is clarity. You must state the purpose of the process. You should be sure to list any special tools or materials that are necessary. Give a summary or overview of the whole, especially if it is a complex procedure. If there are any "branches" that occur (type A or type B), don't let the reader get confused. Go through each step methodically. Try to see it from the point of view of a reader who may not know your terminology.
Here are some examples of the kinds of things dealt with by process analysis
A. How is it made?
gasoline
a baseball
a Newtonian telescope
a sundial
brandy
a photographic enlargementB. How is it done?
starting a club or organization
surviving an earthquake, tornado, riot, boring English class, or other disaster
overcoming something: stage fright, shyness, fear of failure, etc.
raising/growing something: roses, rabbits, tropical fish
pursuing a particular hobby: bird watching, rock climbing, coin collecting
doing your taxes
navigating by the stars
measuring, tracking, detecting, calculating, observing something natural or scientific
Analysis of a sequence
This is very similar to process, except it does not necessarily explain how to do it, but rather how it happens or how it works. The material is still laid out in definite stages, but your purpose is to explain what happens rather than how to do it. Here are some examples of the kinds of things dealt with in a sequence analysis:
A. Natural
biological
life cycles: plants, insects, bacteria, viruses, fish
diseases
reproduction
behavioral patterns: predators, courtship, communication, migration
cellular respiration or photosynthesisphysical
meteorological: tornado, hurricane, thunderstorm, hail
geological: earthquake, tides
astronomical: eclipse, supernova, thermonucleosynthesis, time (calendar problems, the equation of time, mean and apparent time, sidereal time, etc.)B. Social
governmental
how laws are made (at a particular level of government)
how elections are conducted
how legal actions are takencommunity
how a neighborhood is formed or declines
how a feud begins or endsfamily
how a ceremony such as a wedding or funeral takes place in a certain culture
how the legal system handles reports of abused or neglected childrenC. Technical or scientific
how a television works
how an automatic transmission works
how an integrated circuit works
by James. B. Stockdale
James Stockdale spent eight years in a North Vietnamese prison during the Vietnam War. He was the senior American Officer in the "Hanoi Hilton." He endured physical and psychological torture. After his release he was, at the recommendation of all the other American prisoners, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. When asked what gave him the ability to endure, he claimed that education was his greatest weapon. In an Atlantic Monthly article in 1978 he discusses this idea. Notice the classification structure of this discussion:
Bob North, a political science professor at Stanford, taught me a course called "Comparative Marxist Thought." This was not an anticommunist course. It was the study of dogma and thought patterns. We read no criticisms of Marxism, only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin. In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did. I was able to say to that interrogator, "That's not what Lenin said; you're a deviationist."
One of the things North talked about was brainwashing. A psychologist who studied the Korean prisoner situation, which somewhat paralleled ours, concluded that three categories of prisoners were involved there. The first was the redneck Marine sergeant from Tennessee who had an eighth grade education. He would get in that interrogation room and they would say that the Spanish-American War was started by the bomb within the Maine, which might be true, and he would answer, "B.S." They would show him something about racial unrest in Detroit. "B.S." There was no way they could get to him; his mind was made up. He was a straight guy, red, white, and blue, and everything else was B.S.! He didn't give it a second thought. Not much of a historian, perhaps, but a good security risk
In the next category were the sophisticates. They were the fellows who could be told these same things about the horrors of American history and our social problems, but had heard it all before, knew both sides of every story, and thought we were on the right track. They weren't ashamed that we had robber barons at a certain time in our history; they were aware of the skeletons in most civilizations' closets. They could not be emotionally involved and so they were good security risks.
The ones who were in trouble were the high school graduates who had enough sense to pick up the innuendo, and yet not enough education to accommodate it properly. Not many of them fell, but most of the men that got entangled started from that background.
The psychologist's point is possibly over simplistic, but I think his message has some validity. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Generally speaking, I think education is a tremendous defense; the broader, the better. After I was shot down my wife, Sybil, found a clipping glued in the front of my collegiate dictionary: "Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity."
Stockdale's development is brief, but his classification structure is clear:
There were three types of prisoners in terms of educational background
- uneducated
- well educated
- partly educated
The following is taken from a chapter of McPherson's book Battle Cry of Freedom. The chapter discusses the effects of the U.S. war with Mexico ("Mexico Will Poison Us" pp. 54-55):
Free-soil sentiment in 1847 can be visualized in three concentric circles. At the center was a core of abolitionists who considered slavery a sinful violation of human rights that should be immediately expiated. Surrounding and drawing ideological nourishment from them was a larger circle of antislavery people who looked upon bondage as an evil-by which they meant that it was socially repressive, economically backwards, and politically harmful to the interests of free states. This circle comprised mainly Whigs (and some Democrats) from the Yankee belt of states and regions north of the 41st parallel who regarded this issue as more important than any other in American politics. The outer circle contained all those who had voted for the Wilmot Proviso but did not necessarily consider it the most crucial matter facing the country and were open to compromise. This outer circle included such Whigs as Abraham Lincoln, who believed slavery "an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and the State" which "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites," but who also believed that "the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils" by uniting the South in defense of the institution. The outer circle also included Democrats, like Martin Van Buren, who cared little about the consequences of slavery for the slaves and had been allied with the "slave power" until it had blocked Van Buren's nomination in 1844.
All free soilers-except perhaps some of the Van Burenites-concurred with the following set of propositions: free labor was more efficient that slave labor because it was motivated by the inducement of wages and the ambition for upward mobility rather that by the coercion of the lash; slavery undermined the dignity of manual work by associating it with servility and thereby degraded white labor wherever bondage existed; slavery inhibited education and social improvements and kept poor whites as well as slaves in ignorance; the institution therefore mired all southerners except the slaveowning gentry in poverty and repressed the development of a diversified economy; slavery must be kept out of all new territories so that free labor could flourish there.
For some members of the two outer circles these propositions did not spring from a "squeamish sensitiveness . . . nor morbid sympathy for the slave," as David Wilmot put it. "The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent. . . . I would preserve for white labor a fair country . . . where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor." If slavery goes into the new territories, wrote free-soil editor and poet William Cullen Bryant, "the free labor of all the states will not." But if slavery is kept out, "the free labor of the states [will go] there . . . and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population.
McPherson's essay structure seems as simple as Stockdale's; he simply lists and describes each category in turn. However, in this case the categories are set up as concentric circles, the largest containing the other two, like rings in a target.
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