Writing Well: The Perfect Couple: Cause and Effect

The Perfect Couple: Cause and Effect

Question: Why are there so many Smiths in the phone book?

Answer: They all have phones.

A perfect example of a cause-and-effect relationship. The cause is why something happens; the effect is result, what happens due to the cause. Therefore, cause-and-effect essays establish a relationship between events.

Cause and effect usually (but not always) happen in time order: The cause comes first, creating an effect. The following chart shows this order of events:

Cause	Brings About	Effect
door slams	brings about	picture falling

But with complex relationships, you'll likely be dealing with multiple causes and effects. An effect may have more than one cause, as the following diagram shows:

Cause 1
Cause 2	bring about	effect
Cause 3
people skills
ability to network	bring about	a job in real estate
professional license

A cause may also have more than one effect. For example:

		Effect 1
Cause	results in	Effect 2
		Effect 3
		Tim misses the train.
Tim oversleeps	results in	He's late for work.
		The 9:00 meeting is off.

The cause always takes place before the effect: Something happens, which leads to a result. But the cause and effect don't have to be presented in time order in the passage. The effect may be presented first, even though the cause occurred earlier.

Check It Out

How can you make sure you're on target when you write cause-and-effect papers? Use this checklist:

• I've shown a clear cause-and-effect relationship between events.
  
  Just because one event occurred before the other doesn't mean that causality exists. Perhaps there's another explanation for the events—coincidence, accident, and so on. Here's false causality: “24 hours in a day … 24 beers in a case … coincidence?” The answer is, yes, it is. Don't push the envelope; if there's no causality, don't invent it.
• The cause-and-effect relationship I describe is valid.
  
  Just because something happened once doesn't mean that true causality exists. For the relationship to be valid, it has to be repeated. That's why you wait at least a week before you take that toilet-trained toddler out of diapers.
• I've included all relevant causes and effects.
  
  Look beneath the surface to find every factor that affects your analysis. When you omit one or more pertinent causes and effects, you weaken your writing (but you do keep your readers busy poking holes in your thesis).

Chain Gang

Writers often use transitions to signal specific relationships among ideas. Following are the transitions most often used to signal cause and effect relationships. Like well-timed flowers and candy, the right transitions can help you cement relationships.

as a result	because
consequently	due to
for this (that) reason	for
if … then	nevertheless
since	so
so that	therefore
thus	this (that) is how

Here's another model. As you read it, notice the multiple effects from a single cause.

A Tragic Crop

• The potato has had a major historical impact on Ireland. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the average Irish citizen planted potatoes and ate about 10 pounds of potatoes a day—and little else. Potatoes are nourishing: On this diet, the Irish population nearly tripled from the middle of the eighteenth century to just about the middle of the nineteenth century. But depending on only one food was dangerous. When the potato blight hit Europe in 1845, the results were devastating in Ireland. There, the potato famine meant more than starvation that year. It meant no seed potatoes to use to grow the next year's crop. It meant that the pig or cow that would usually have been sold to pay the rent had to be slaughtered, because there was nothing to fatten it on. No pig or cow meant no rent. No rent meant eviction. As a result, homelessness and disease followed on the heels of hunger. Almost a million Irish people died as a result of the potato blight. Another million moved to the United States.

Now, let's turn to another type of exposition, the classify-divide method of organization.