Composing amazing topics for classification essays

A classification essay is one that requires the writer to organize or sort different things into different categories. There are three steps that you can take to produce an effective classification essay:

• Sort the items into a useful category
• Ensure all of the categories have one organizing principle
• Provide examples for the categories

Finding Different Categories

One of the most important steps in writing a classification paper is to find the categories into which you will place things. For example if you have a pile of papers sitting on your table and you need to organize them how would you do it?

It wouldn’t do you any good to just divide them into meaningless groups. You want to divide them into useful groups. One category might be things that you have to read. Another might be things that you have to give to someone else. Other categories might include things that need thrown away or things that need filed.

Creating a Thesis Statement

The thesis statement will more often than not explain to the reader what the topic is and how the topic will be classified. Sometimes the thesis names the categories.

The layout looks like this:

Topic… how it is classified… category and category

For example: tourists visiting Rome can enjoy two modes of public transportation: buses and the metro.

How to write your classification essay in an effective manner

Step 1: determine the categories you are going to include. Do not leave out any important categories. Be quite thorough. If your example is the same as that above remember that your paper may be incomplete if you leave out taxis. On the other hand you do not want to blur the classification with too many categories. Try and limit the categories to things that only tourists would use not necessarily all of the transportation options which are available throughout the city.

Step 2: classify things based on a single principle. After you have selected your categories you need to make sure they fit into the same principle. Your organizing principle is what determines how you establish the different categories. So for the example above the organizing principle is transportation for tourists not just transportation as a whole.

Step 3: support all of your categories with examples. Each category needs to have examples. It is best to have the same number of examples for each category.

Common transitions:

• The first/second/third kind
• The first/second/third type
• The first/second/third group

Below are some essay topics you might consider for your next paper:

• Classifying historical events in a particular country
• Classifying different countries
• Classifying different diseases
• Classifying different movies