Developing Causal Arguments

Exploring Possible Claims

To begin creating a strong causal claim, try listing some of the effects — events or phenomena — that you’d like to know the causes of:

Or try moving in the opposite direction, listing some phenomena or causes you’re interested in and then hypothesizing what kinds of effects they may produce:

Read a little about the causal issues that interest you most, and then try them out on friends and colleagues. They might suggest ways to refocus or clarify what you want to do or offer leads to finding information about your subject. After some initial research, map out the causal relationship you want to explore in simple form:

X might cause (or might be caused by) Y for the following reasons:

Such a statement should be tentative because writing a causal argument should be an exercise in which you uncover facts, not assume them to be true. Often, your early assumptions (Tuition was raised to renovate the stadium) might be undermined by the facts you later discover (Tuition doesn’t fund the construction or maintenance of campus buildings).

You might even decide to write a wildly exaggerated or parodic causal argument for humorous purposes. Humorist Dave Barry does this when he explains the causes of El Niño and other weather phenomena: “So we see that the true cause of bad weather, contrary to what they have been claiming all these years, is TV weather forecasters, who have also single-handedly destroyed the ozone layer via overuse of hair spray.” Most of the causal reasoning you do, however, will take a serious approach to subjects that you, your family, and your friends care about.

Defining the Causal Relationships

In developing a causal claim, you can examine the various types of causes and effects in play in a given argument and define their relationship. Begin by listing all the plausible causes or effects you need to consider. Then decide which are the most important for you to analyze or the easiest to defend or critique. The following chart on “Causes” may help you to appreciate some important terms and relationships.

Even the most everyday causal analysis can draw on such distinctions among reasons and causes. What persuaded you, for instance, to choose the college you decided to attend? Proximate reasons might be the location of the school or the college’s curriculum in your areas of interest. But what are the necessary reasons — the ones without which your choice of that college could not occur? Adequate financial support? Good test scores and academic record? The expectations of a parent?

Once you’ve identified a causal claim, you can draw out the reasons, warrants, and evidence that can support it most effectively:

Supporting Your Point

In drafting your causal argument, you’ll want to do the following:

In other words, you will need to examine your subject carefully and find appropriate ways to support your claims. There are different ways to accomplish that goal.

For example, in studying effects that are physical (as they would be with diseases or climate conditions), you can offer and test hypotheses, or theories about possible causes. That means researching such topics thoroughly because you’ll need to draw upon authorities and research articles for your explanations and evidence. (See Chapter 17, “Academic Arguments,” and Chapter 18, “Finding Evidence.”) Don’t be surprised if you find yourself debating which among conflicting authorities make the most plausible causal or explanatory arguments. Your achievement as a writer may be simply that you present these differences in an essay, leaving it to readers to make judgments of their own — as John Tierney does in “Can a Playground Be Too Safe?” at the end of this chapter.

But not all the evidence in compelling causal arguments needs to be strictly scientific or scholarly. Many causal arguments rely on ethnographic observations — the systematic study of ordinary people in their daily routines. How would you explain, for example, why some people step aside when they encounter someone head-on and others do not? In an argument that attempts to account for such behavior, investigators Frank Willis, Joseph Gier, and David Smith observed “1,038 displacements involving 3,141 persons” at a Kansas City shopping mall. In results that surprised the investigators, “gallantry” seemed to play a significant role in causing people to step aside for one another — more so than other causes that the investigators had anticipated (such as deferring to someone who’s physically stronger or higher in status). Doubtless you’ve read of other such studies, perhaps in psychology courses. You may even decide to do a little fieldwork on your own — which raises the possibility of using personal experiences in support of a causal argument.

Indeed, people’s experiences generally lead them to draw causal conclusions about things they know well. Personal experience can also help build your credibility as a writer, gain the empathy of listeners, and thus support a causal claim. Although one person’s experiences cannot ordinarily be universalized, they can still argue eloquently for causal relationships. Listen to Sara Barbour, a recent graduate of Columbia University, as she draws upon her own carefully described experiences to bemoan what may happen when e-readers finally displace printed books:

In eliminating a book’s physical existence, something crucial is lost forever. Trapped in a Kindle, the story remains but the book can no longer be scribbled in, hoarded, burned, given, or received. We may be able to read it, but we can’t share it with others in the same way, and its ability to connect us to people, places, and ideas is that much less powerful.

I know the Kindle will eventually carry the day — an electronic reader means no more embarrassing coffee stains, no more library holds and renewals, no more frantic flipping through pages for a lost quote, or going to three bookstores in one afternoon to track down an evasive title. Who am I to advocate the doom of millions of trees when the swipe of a finger can deliver all 838 pages of Middlemarch into my waiting hands?

But once we all power up our Kindles something will be gone, a kind of language. Books communicate with us as readers — but as important, we communicate with each other through books themselves. When that connection is lost, the experience of reading — and our lives — will be forever altered.

— Sara Barbour, “Kindle vs. Books: The Dead Trees Society,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2011

All these strategies — testing hypotheses, presenting experimental evidence, and offering personal experience — can help you support a causal argument or undermine a causal claim you regard as faulty.

Considering Design and Visuals

You may find that the best way to illustrate a causal relationship is to present it visually. Even a simple bar graph or chart can demonstrate a relationship between two variables that might be related to a specific cause, like the one above showing the dramatic effects of lowered birthrates. The report that uses this figure explores the effects that such a change would have on the economies of the world.

Or you may decide that the most dramatic way to present important causal information about a single issue or problem is via an infographic, cartoon, or public service announcement. Our arresting example below is part of a campaign by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). An organization that advocates for animal rights, PETA promotes campaigns that typically try to sway people to adopt vegetarian diets by depicting the practices of the agriculture industry as cruel. (Many of us have also seen their celebrity anti-fur campaigns; see “Examining Arguments Based on Facts and Reason: Logos” in Chapter 6, “Rhetorical Analysis” for one example.) Their “Meat’s Not Green!” campaign, however, attempts to reach an audience that might not buy into the animal rights argument. Instead, it appeals to people who have environmentalist beliefs by presenting data that claims a causal link between animal farming and environmental destruction. How much of this data surprises you?