1. Life is full of misunderstandings. Think of some situations in which you have witnessed misunderstandings. They may have occurred at work, at home, or in some extra curricular activity. See if you can devise categories for these misunderstandings. Try to explain each category by analyzing (picking apart) what happened in one or two incidents. (136)
2. Have you ever encountered a stereotype—a statement that treats a wide variety of individuals as if they were all alike? You may have heard, for example, that all New Yorkers are rude, all Westerners love the great outdoors, all Newfoundlanders tell funny stories. If you happen to be from any of these places, you know for a fact that the people come in dozens of varieties. Choose a group of people that is often reduced to a single stereotype and write an essay classifying individual types within that group. (131)
3. Think of a group of people or things you happen to know well: your friends, perhaps, or your relatives, or musical instruments, or varieties of poetry. Then classify the individuals in the group into categories that make sense. Remember, though, that not just any classification will result in an interesting paper. You will have to discover a division that reveals something that would otherwise be obscure to your readers, or a classification that somehow makes sense of what would otherwise seem random and vaguely related individual instances. (120)