Education

Step 3 - Choosing the Definition Type

You need to start with the designation for the definition. You can’t define the concept unless you know what type of concept you are defining. Let’s put the research we’ve done into this section as a reference for our work here.

TermCategorySubcategoryAttribute
pattern-hiding displayaccess controlinformation
pattern-hidingsession lockConcealing information previously visible on a display.
screen saver lockThe capability, when the computer is locked, to set the screen to black or display selected or random images or numbers.
displaycomputingProcess or facility of presenting data or images on a computer screen or other device.

Choosing the definition designator

Designations are attributed to the concept you are defining, not the individual term. Designations for definitions fall into two categories: parts of speech designations and named entity designations. Parts of speech are noun, pronoun, adjective, determiner, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, or interjection. As we will discuss later, named entities can be any of those entities we’ve already named; asset, data contents, events, group, organization, organizational function, person, record example, role, or title. Or they can be additional named entities that you have defined. We will ignore named entities for now.

From our research here, we know that this isn’t a verb. It’s a noun. Simple.

TermDesignator
pattern-hiding displaynoun

Deciding on a definition type

Now its time to go back to the cheat sheet. We listed 7 different definition types. We are going to ignore all except the intensional definition because we are starting with simple definitions here. So we know that we’ll first be defining the genus of the term and then adding its differentia. We’ll do that in our worksheet for each of the attributes that we have.

TermDesignatorGenusAttribute
pattern-hiding displaynoun
pattern-hidingnounsession lock mechanismconceals information previously visible on the display
nounscreen saver mechanismsets the screen to black or displays selected or random images or numbers
displayverbcomputingpresenting data or images on a computer screen or other device

Formatting your definition

This is really just a matter of putting everything together.

TermDesignatorGenusAttributes
pattern-hiding displaynounA session lock or screen saver mechanism thatconceals information previously on the display by
setting the screen to black, or
displaying selected or random images or numbers.

And there you have it, you have learned how to write a definition.

A pattern-hiding display is a session lock or screen saver mechanism that conceals information previously on the display by setting the screen to black or displaying selected or random images or numbers.

Continue Reading

Get the Definitions Book

    This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.