A necessary but neglected step in teaching classification to inexperienced writers is list making and categorizing. Learning that step gives the untrained writer practical experience in learning that a good writer classifies for a purpose and that a relationship exists between the evidence, the categories, the outline, the paragraph, and the whole paper. Seventh grade students have a difficult time classifying using broad abstractions and categories that are grammatically parallel. Some lessons in list making and categorizing include: listing and categorizing in teacher-made categories the nouns in "The Walrus and the Carpenter"; listing and categorizing in student-made categories the nouns in "The Copperfaces, the Red Men" by Carl Sandburg; doing a series of lessons on horizontal and vertical classification taken from "The Difficult Learning Project" and from a rhetoric textbook; and doing a series of speeches and essays based on classification of hobbies and on the reading of literature. From these lessons, students learn that lists and categories can help in understanding literature better, learn to recognize the relationship between items in lists and categories, learn how important language is in classifying, and learn to organize their writing better. (TJ)