Cause & Effect Essay

Cause and effect is a rhetorical style that focuses on the connection between causes and effects. This kind of essay is commonly encountered in both writing classes and other disciplines. For example, you may be asked to write about the causes for the decline of a particular company in your business class, or you may be asked to write about the causes of the rise in obesity rates in the United States for your nursing class. A cause and effect essay should clearly identify why something happens or what happens as a result or something.

Techniques

1. Research the events thoroughly. It is easy to find one obvious cause or effect, and careful research will help you discover any others that are worth communicating.

2. Explain the causes and effects in order. List the causes in chronological order. Organizing by time makes it easy for the reader to understand.

3. Explain how certain you are. If you find evidence showing that one connection is very strong, write that. If there’s a slight or possible connection, write that. If you're predicting a future effect where an effect is likely but not certain, write that. In any case, use evidence or logical reasoning to support your claims.

4. Avoid post hoc reasoning. Post hoc reasoning is when one action happens before another, and you conclude that the first action caused the second action. A good example of this is superstitions. For example, if you wear a new sweater the day you ace an exam, you might believe that it’s your lucky sweater.

5. Use paragraphs to make things clear. There are no strict rules about the number of paragraphs. Often, a writer will describe one cause or one effect in a single paragraph. However, if the paragraph gets long and unwieldy, it can be split into two or three paragraphs. Your essay may focus mainly on the causes, mainly on the effects, or both equally.

6. There are several common structures. One common structure is the block structure. When using the block structure, there could be one cause with several effects, or there could be several causes with one effect. Another common structure is the chain structure, where one cause leads to an effect, that effect leads to another effect, and a chain reaction occurs. Regardless of the structure, be specific about what the causes and effects are.

Vocabulary

Here are some useful expressions for signaling cause and effect.

Correlation is Not Causation

Correlation is not causation. Another way of putting this is, maybe you can find a pattern, but that doesn't mean one thing causes another. This is easiest to see through examples.

1. Ice cream sales and deaths by drowning are both low in winter and high in summer. Does buying ice cream cause drowning?

2. Ex-smokers are more likely to die of lung cancer than current smokers. Does stopping smoking cause lung cancer?

3. Children that watch a lot of TV are the most violent. Does watching TV make you violent?

4. The more firemen are sent to a fire, the more damage is done. Are firemen dangerous?

5. Children with tutors get worse grades than children without tutors. Are tutors harmful?

We can often use common sense to determine whether one thing causes another, but some situations are complex and it can be difficult to prove. Some university-level courses delve deeply into the subject. For the sake of this essay, be clear about what you think causes what, and why. If something is a partial cause, a possible cause, or one of several causes, write that.

Confounding happens when a third variable is a cause of both variables we are considering. This is also called a causal fork. In the ice-cream-and-drowning-deaths example depicted above, hot weather is a third variable, likely to cause an increase in both ice cream sales and number of deaths by drowning.

Selection bias is another reason that we sometimes find patterns in data that look like causation but aren't. For example, a newspaper might conduct a survey to find out what newspapers are popular. If the survey is conducted by telephone using home phones (landlines), it is likely to under-count younger adults who only own cellphones. Similarly, if the survey is conducted during the day, people who work 9-5 jobs won't be included, and if it's conducted in the evening, people who work night jobs won't be included.

References

• Cause & Effect Essay. (2023). Excelsior Online Writing Lab, Excelsior University. Retrieved 2024. CC BY-SA 4.0. Some of the above content was copy/pasted from here.

• Frost, Jim. (2024). Selection Bias: Definition & Examples. Retrieved 2024.

• Isager, P. M. (2023). Why does correlation not equal causation? CC BY-SA 4.0. Some of the above content was copy/pasted from here.

• Meyers, A. (2013). Longman Academic Writing: Essays to Research Papers. Pearson.

• Sexton J. and Soles D. (2019). Composition and Literature. B.C. Open Textbook Collection.

• Smith, S. (2022). Cause & effect essays. EAP Foundation. Retrieved 2024.