The Assignment: Explaining Causes and Effects

Pick a disturbing fact or situation that you have observed, and seek out its causes and effects to help you and your readers understand the issue better. You may limit your essay to the causes or the effects, or you may include both but emphasize one more than the other. Yun Yung Choi uses the last approach when she identifies the cause of the status of Korean women (Confucianism) but spends most of her essay detailing effects of this cause.

The situation you choose may have affected you and people you know well, such as student loan policies, the difficulty of working while going to school, or a challenge facing your family. It might have affected people in your city or region—a small voter turnout in an election, decaying bridge supports, or dog owners not picking up their pets’ waste. It may affect society at large—identity theft, immigration laws, or the high cost of health care. It might be gender or racial stereotypes on television, binge drinking, teenage suicide, climate change, or student debt. Don’t think you must choose an earthshaking topic to write a good paper. On the contrary, you will do a better job if you are personally familiar with the situation you choose.

These students selected topics of personal concern for causal analysis:

One student cited her observations of the hardships faced by Indians in rural Mexico as one cause of rebellions there.

Another analyzed the negative attitudes of men toward women at her workplace and the resulting tension, inefficiency, and low production.

A third contended that buildings in Miami are not constructed to withstand hurricanes due, in part, to an inadequate inspection system.

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Generating Ideas

Find a Topic. What familiar situation would be informative or instructive to explore? This assignment leaves you the option of writing from what you know, what you can find out, or a combination of the two. Begin by letting your thoughts wander over the results of a particular situation. Has the situation always been this way? Or has it changed in the last few years? Have things gotten better or worse?

When your thoughts begin to percolate, jot down likely topics. Then choose the idea that you care most about and that promises to be neither too large nor too small. A paper confined to the causes of a family’s move from New Jersey to Montana might be a single sentence: “My father’s company transferred him.” But the subsequent effects of the move on the family might become an interesting essay. On the other hand, you might need hundreds of pages to study all the effects of gangs in urban high schools. Instead, you might select just one unusual effect, such as gang members staking out territory in the parking lot of a local school.

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List Causes and Effects. After noting causes and effects, consider which are immediate (evident and close at hand), which are remote (underlying, more basic, or earlier), and how you might arrange them in a logical sequence or causal chain.

Once you figure out the basic causal relationships, focus on complexities or implications. Probe for contributing, related, or even hidden factors. As you draft, these ideas will be a rich resource, allowing you to focus on the most important causes or effects and to skip any that are minor.

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Consider Sources of Support. After identifying causes and effects, note your evidence next to each item. You can then see at a glance exactly where you need more material. Star or underline any causes and effects that stand out as major ones. Ask, How significant is this cause? Would the situation not exist without it? (This major cause deserves a big star.) Or would the situation have arisen without it, for some other reason? (This minor cause might still matter but be less important.) Has this effect had a resounding impact? How much detail do you need to give about the results?

As you set priorities—identifying major causes or effects and noting missing information—you may wish to talk with others, use a search engine, or browse the library Web site for sources of supporting ideas, details, and statistics. You might look for illustrations of the problem, accounts of comparable situations, or charts showing current data and projections.

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Planning, Drafting, and Developing

Start with a Scratch Outline and Thesis. Yun Yung Choi’s “Invisible Women” follows a clear plan based on a brief scratch outline that simply lists the effects of the change:

Intro—Personal anecdote

–Tie with Korean history

–Then add working thesis: The turnabout for women resulted from the influence of Confucianism in all aspects of society.

Comparison and contrast of status of women before and after Confucianism

Effects of Confucianism on women

Conclusion: Impact still evident in Korea today but some hints of change

The paper makes its point: it identifies Confucianism as the reason for the status of Korean women and details four specific effects of Confucianism on women in Korean society. And it shows that cause and effect are closely related: Confucianism is the cause of the change in the status of Korean women, and Confucianism has had specific effects on Korean women.

Organize to Show Causes and Effects to Your Audience. Your paper’s core—showing how the situation came about (the causes), what followed as a result (the effects), or both—likely will follow one of these patterns:

Try planning by grouping causes and effects, then classifying them as major or minor. If you are writing about why more students accumulate credit-card debt now than a generation ago, you might list the following:

On reflection you might decide that available credit, credit limits, and interest rates are determined by the credit card industry, government regulation, and current economic conditions. These factors certainly affect students, but you are more interested in causes and effects that individual students might be able to influence in order to minimize their debt. You consider whether your own growing debt is due to too little income or too many expenses. You could then organize the causes from least to most important, giving the major one more space and the final place. When your plan seems logical, discuss it or share a draft with a classmate, a friend, or your instructor. Ask whether your organization will make sense to someone else.

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Introduce the Situation. Begin your draft by describing the situation you want to explain in no more than two or three paragraphs. Tell readers your task—explaining causes, effects, or both. Instead of doing this in a flat, mechanical fashion (“Now I am going to explain the causes”), announce your task casually, as if you were talking to someone: “At first, I didn’t realize that keeping six pet cheetahs in our backyard would bother the neighbors.” Or tantalize your readers as one writer did in a paper about her father’s sudden move to a Trappist monastery: “The real reason for Father’s decision didn’t become clear to me for a long while.”

Work in Your Evidence. Some writers want to rough out a cause-and-effect draft, positioning all the major points first and then circling back to pull in supporting explanations and details. Others want to plunge deeply into each section—stating the main point, elaborating, and working in the evidence all at once. Tables, charts, and graphs can often consolidate information that substantiates or illustrates causes or effects. Place any graphics near the related text discussion, supporting but not duplicating it.

Revising and Editing

Because explaining causes and effects takes hard thought, set aside plenty of time for rewriting. As Yun Yung Choi approached her paper’s final version, she wanted to rework her thesis for greater precision with more detail.

Taking a cue from Choi, ask yourself the following questions about your thesis when you revise any cause-and-effect paper.

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Choi also faced a problem pointed out by classmates: how to make a smooth transition from recalling her own experience to probing causes.

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After you have revised your cause-and-effect essay, edit and proofread it. Carefully check the grammar, word choice, punctuation, and mechanics—and then correct any problems you find.