Definitions

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Aim: How to use definitions and effective examples in your writing

 

1. The Importance of Definitions

What is chance? Dictionaries define it as something fortuitous that happens unpredictably without discernible human intention. Chance is unintentional and capricious, but we needn't conclude that chance is immune from human intervention. Indeed chance plays several distinct roles when humans react creatively with one another and with their environment.

We can readily distinguish four varieties of chance if we consider that they each involve a different kind of motor activity and a special kind of sensory receptivity. The varieties of chance also involve distinctive personality traits and differ in the way one particular individual influences them. (Kanar, 1994, p.414)

2. Integrating Definitions
Rapoport and Rapoport (171) define dual-career marriage as "one in which both partners have a developmental character, and [involve jobs] which from personal rewards are derived" (p. 468). Dual career-marriages need to be distinguished from dual-employment marriages by the wife's academic preparation, motivation for working, and level of career commitment (Thomas, Albrecht & White, 1984). Husbands and wives are affected differently by these structural changes (p. 230-231)

3. Length

a.  Synonym:
The uppermost layer, the canopy, consists of... (From Writing across the Disciplines, p. 199)

Computer programmers (people who write instructions for computers) and systems analysts (people who analyse problems and recommend solutions) designed and implemented the applications by studying the problems, designing new systems, and creating computer programs to perform essentially the same tasks that clerks previously performed.
(From Essentials of Management, p. 174 as qu. in Arnaudet and Barrett, p. 117).

Disasters - floods, epidemics, and war - cause drastic changes in people's lives.
(From Psychology p. 457 qu. in Amaudet and Barrett p. 118).

b.   Sentence:
Those psychologists who have applied basic knowledge in the subdisciplines of motivation, learning, and personality to an understanding of work behaviour in organizations have identified themselves as 'industrial psychologists'.
(From: Essentials of Management p. 136 qu. in Arnaudet and Barrett, p. 117).

c.  Extended:
"Cultural literacy" is defined as the "network of information that all competent readers possess." He further describes it as "background information, stored in our minds" which enables a reader to understand both the stated and the unstated context which makes literature meaningful. The importance of cultural literacy, Hirsch says, is that once it is part of America's educational system we will have greater "economic prosperity" greater "social justice," and "more effective democracy".
(From Writing across the Disciplines, p.333).

4. Types of Definitions

"'Psychotic' means being so severely disturbed that one is 'out of contact with reality' or that one's 'reality testing' is so poor that misinterpretations of ordinary situations grossly interfere with adaption (Achenbach, p. 414)... I believe Luke falls into the category we call childhood psychoses..." (Sanders, p. 340).

Historical Definition

Conjoint family therapy emerged in the 1950's and holds the view that the family is a social system in which each member's behaviour is a function of pressures existing in the whole system. In this system, a child's problems and difficulties are viewed as symptoms of family stress and as serving a function for the family; the child is in a way informing the family of problems that exist. (Sanders, p. 344).

Classification

Read this extract before you come to the lecture!!!

Oppressed people deal with their oppression in three characteristic ways. One way is acquiescence: the oppressed resign themselves to their doom. They tacitly adjust themselves to oppression, and thereby become conditioned to it. In every movement toward freedom some of the oppressed prefer to remain oppressed. Almost 2800 years ago Moses set out to lead the children of Israel from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the promised land. He soon discovered that slaves do not always welcome their deliverers. They become accustomed to being slaves. They would rather bear those ills they have, as Shakespeare pointed out, than flee to others that they know not of. They prefer the "fleshpots of Egypt" to the ordeals of emancipation....

A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred. Violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones...

The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of non-violent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of non-violent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites - the acquiescence and violence - while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both .... It seems to me that this is the method that must guide the actions of the Negro in the present crisis in race relations....

This extract is from Martin Luther King's "The Ways of Meeting Oppression" as quoted in Carol Kanar's book The Confident Writer on pages 307-308. The book was published by Houghton Mifflin Co. in Boston. How would you cite this reference?

Exemplification
Inanimate objects are classified into three major categories - those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him, and three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down, at the moment when it is most needed will do so. The automobile is typical of this category (Kanar, 1994, p. 297-298).

What about your writing?

Never begin a sentence with 'and'.
The only real problem with that rule is that it shouldn't be a rule at all.
 It's good enough advice, as far as it goes. When readers see and at the  start of a sentence, their first thought is likely to be that word introduces a tacked-on idea that logically should be part of the previous sentence.  More often than not, they are right. Still there's no rule. Precisely because most sentences don't and shouldn't begin with and, many good writers sometimes use the word to single out a sentence for special notices and dramatic emphasis. (Sebranek, 1992)