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 pet owners not using pooper-scoopers. 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 at parties, spouse abuse, teenage suicide, global warming, student debt, or the use of dragnets for ocean fishing. 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.
The major challenge writers face when exploring causal relationships is how to limit the subject. When you explore a given phenomenon — whether local unemployment or the success of your favorite band — devoting equal space to all possible causes and effects will either overwhelm your readers or put them to sleep. Instead, you need to decide what you want to show your readers — and then emphasize the causal relationships that help achieve this purpose.
Rely on your purpose to help you decide which part of the relationship — cause or effect — to stress and how to limit your ideas to strengthen your overall point. If you are writing about your family’s transportation problems, for example, you may be tempted to discuss all the possible causes and then analyze all the effects it has had on you. Your readers, however, won’t want to know about every single complication. Both you and your readers will have a much easier time if you make some decisions about your focus: