Classifying is an essential writing strategy for thinking about and organizing ideas, information, and experience. The process of classifying involves either grouping or dividing. Writers group related items (such as apples, oranges, bananas, strawberries, cantaloupes, and cherries) and label the general class of items they grouped together (fruit). Or they begin classifying with a general class (such as fruit) and then divide it into subclasses of particular types (apples, oranges, etc.).
This chapter shows how you can organize and illustrate a classification you have read about or constructed yourself, and it concludes with some sentence strategies you might use when classifying information.