Talk:Professional and Technical Writing/Design/Document Organization

Formal classification: It would be helpful to give examples of principles of classification so one would know exactly what they are Informal classification: example is rather long, I would recommend cutting some sections out..

For example, Calvin needed to organize his an analysis, requested by his employer, of advertisements in three trade journals for the heavy equipment industry. Calvin could have created a formal classification by grouping the ads according to an objective characteristic, such as their size or number of words used in them. Instead, he classified them according to the type of advertising appeal they made. "Type of advertising appeal" is not an objective characteristic. Defining an ad's appeal requires subjective interpretation and judgment. Calvin used this informal classification because it best matched his readers' goal, which was to plan the advertising strategies he would use later in the year when he began placing ads in the three journals.