Choosing a style and design

When you analyze cause and effect, you’ll often be offering an argument or exploring an idea for an audience you need to interest. You can do that through both style and design.

Consider a middle style. Even causal analyses written for fairly academic audiences incline toward the middle style because of its flexibility: It can be both familiar and serious. (define your style) Here Robert Bruegmann, discussing the causes of urban sprawl, uses language that is simple, clear, and colloquial — and almost entirely free of technical jargon.

When asked, most Americans declare themselves to be against sprawl, just as they say they are against pollution or the destruction of historic buildings. But the very development that one individual targets as sprawl is often another family’s much-loved community. Very few people believe that they themselves live in sprawl or contribute to sprawl. Sprawl is where other people live, particularly people with less good taste. Much antisprawl activism is based on a desire to reform these other people’s lives.

— “How Sprawl Got a Bad Name,” American Enterprise, June 2006

Adapt the style to the subject matter. Friendly as it is, a middle style can still make demands of readers, as the following passage from an essay by Professor Paula Marantz Cohen of Drexel University demonstrates. In it she explains how our culture is training us to expect clear and accessible explanations for subtle and complex matters, pointing to her own experience with a DVD that tries to be too helpful. Though the language is sophisticated — see the items highlighted — this is middle style at its best, making complex claims and proving them in a way that keeps knowledgeable readers interested.

Consider some other ways we have been conditioned to expect hard explanations for soft things (e.g., works of the imagination, and moral and philosophical questions). DVDs give us “special features,” that often seem to diminish our understanding of the film or our appreciation of it. The idea applies to television as well. After watching the last episode of [HBO’s] Girls, I happened to let the show run on to the after-show sequence, in which creator and star Lena Dunham explained what we had just seen. Not only did her banal exegesis lessen the power of the episode, it made me less interested in her quirky persona. What had looked smart and funny, creative and irreverent, was forced into an explanatory mold and both became uninteresting and co-opted into the very sort of neatly packaged form that the show seems to oppose. I didn’t want to see a counterculture icon giving me a lecture on relationship stability.

— “Too Much Information,” The American Scholar, June 18, 2013

Use appropriate supporting media. Causal analyses have no special design features. But, like reports and arguments, they can employ charts that summarize information and graphics that illustrate ideas. USA Today, for instance, uses its daily “snapshots” to present causal data culled from surveys. Because causal analyses usually have distinct sections or parts, they do fit nicely into PowerPoint presentations. (think visually)