Cause and Effect Essay

Every time you ask "why," you are wondering about the causes of an event, and every time you ask "what would happen if…," you are wondering about the effects. At work, psychologists explore the causes of their clients' behavior, mechanics seek the causes of malfunctioning machines, and physicians try to find the causes of their patients' symptoms. Every time you decide to make a change in your life, whether to enroll in college, to get married, or just to skip lunch, you are reacting to causes. In college courses, you will frequently write papers describing the causes or the effects of an event, e.g., what events led to American involvement in the Spanish-American War, what effects the glaciers had on the land forms in the Northern Hemisphere.

When writing about causes and effects, follow these guidelines:

1. Analyze the relationships among causes and effects carefully. Avoid the following logical errors when analyzing causes and effects:

•  Post hoc is a logical error when one assumes that because one event comes after another, the first is the cause of the second. If you eat out and then get sick than evening, you cannot automatically assume that what you ate made you sick.

•  Oversimplifying multiple causes is an error that occurs when you pinpoint one thing as a cause when, in fact, there are many causes. For example, if you wanted to talk about why HIV is spreading so rapidly in southern Africa , you couldn't just say that people are having too much unprotected sex. You would have to examine the economic, social, religious, and medical conditions that lead to higher rates of infection.

•  Mistaking a correlation for a cause results when you see two things occur together and assume that one causes the other. For example, for many years, scientists have believed that high cholesterol causes heart disease because people with heart disease often have high cholesterol. They assumed that the correlation between cholesterol and heart disease showed that one caused the other. But some recent research is raising the possibility that the scientists' assumption about cause is false. In fact, both high cholesterol and disease may be caused by a third factor, namely, high levels of a certain amino acid.

2. Qualify your assertions. In many instances it is impossible to prove that once event caused another. When you write about a correlation or a cause that you cannot definitively prove, do not overstate your case by writing as if what you say is always true. Instead, qualify your evidence with words and phrases like "often," "frequently," "likely," or "probably." Then your readers will realize that you understand the limitations of your argument.

3. Find a limited focus. You may not be able to write about every cause and effect. Choose one or a few that seem most interesting, most unusual, or most significant and explain the limitations of your focus to your readers.

4. Word the thesis carefully. Your thesis should be clear and limited. For example, "divorce has many effects" is far too broad and vague. A more limited thesis- for example, "Of all the psychological effects of divorce, the pervasive feeling of failure is often one of the most devastating"– provides a clearer focus for both the writer and the reader. Once the thesis has been limited, the writer can then use the techniques of narration, description, or illustration to provide evidence for the thesis.

5. Organize the causes and/or effects to suit your purpose. Four basic organization patterns are available for writing casual analysis:

•  Multiple Causes, Single Effect

•  Single Cause, Multiple Effects

•  Multiple Causes, Multiple Effects

•  Alternating Causes/Effects in a Chain

Choose a pattern that best fits your material and your purpose. You can organize the causes or the effects either chronologically (in the order in which the events occurred? Or emphatically (from least to most important).