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.
| Term | Category | Subcategory | Attribute |
| pattern-hiding display | access control | information | |
| pattern-hiding | session lock | Concealing information previously visible on a display. | |
| screen saver lock | The capability, when the computer is locked, to set the screen to black or display selected or random images or numbers. | ||
| display | computing | Process or facility of presenting data or images on a computer screen or other device. |
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.
| Term | Designator |
| pattern-hiding display | noun |
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.
| Term | Designator | Genus | Attribute |
| pattern-hiding display | noun | ||
| pattern-hiding | noun | session lock mechanism | conceals information previously visible on the display |
| noun | screen saver mechanism | sets the screen to black or displays selected or random images or numbers | |
| display | verb | computing | presenting data or images on a computer screen or other device |
This is really just a matter of putting everything together.
| Term | Designator | Genus | Attributes |
| pattern-hiding display | noun | 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. |
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.