A prolific painter of portraits before and after the French Revolution ...

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Chapter 7
explaining
to the editor, a pamphlet for a community agency, a job analysis for your employer,
an article for a local or school newspaper, a posting or response to a listserve, or an
essay for students in your major are other possibilities. Once you have a tentative audience
and genre, you’ll have a better idea about how to organize your explanation.
Reread your assignment for specific suggestions and guidelines about audience and
genre.
TEACHING TIP
Students often describe habitual
actions for examples:
“I used to watch soap operas
a lot to help me relax.”
Encouraging them to focus
on one specific time will
help generate a more vivid,
specific example: “To break
the tension before my organic
chemistry final, I reviewed
equations for four
hours in the morning and
then relaxed after lunch
with All My Children.” In
effect, this more specific
example illustrates how television
relaxed the writer
on all those other occasions.
D EFINITION AND C LASSIFICATION An essay explaining what something
means or is can be shaped by using a variety of definition strategies or by classifying
the subject.
Definition itself is not a single organizing strategy; it supports a variety of strategies
that may be useful in shaping your essay: description, analysis of parts or function,
comparison/contrast, development by examples, or figures of speech such as
simile, metaphor, and analogy.
Classification, on the other hand, is a single strategy that can organize a paragraph
or even a whole essay quickly. Observers of human behavior, for example, love
to use classification. Grocery shoppers might be classified by types: racers (the ones
who seem to have just won forty-five seconds of free shopping and run down the
aisles filling their carts as fast as possible), talkers (the ones whose phone must be out
of order because they stand in the aisles gossiping forever), penny-pinchers (who always
have their calculators out and read the unit price labels for everything), party
shoppers (who camp out in the junk food aisles, filling their carts with potato chips,
dip, candy, peanuts, and drink mixers), and dawdlers (who leave their carts crosswise
in the aisles while they read twenty-nine different soup can labels). You can write a
sentence or two about each type or devote a whole paragraph to explaining a single
type.
E XAMPLE Development by example can effectively illustrate what something is
or means, but it can also help explain how or why something happens. Usually, an
example describes a specific incident, located at a certain place and occurring at a particular
time, that shows or demonstrates the main idea. In the following paragraph
from Mediaspeak, Donna Woolfolk Cross explains what effects soap operas can have
on addicted viewers. This paragraph is developed by several examples—some described
in detail, others referred to briefly:
Dedicated watchers of soap operas often confuse fact with fiction. ...Stars
of soap operas tell hair-raising stories of their encounters with fans suffering
from this affliction. Susan Lucci, who plays the promiscuous Erica Kane
on “All My Children,” tells of a time she was riding in a parade: “We were
PROFESSIONAL COPY—NOT FOR RESALE