Introduction

Humans are curious beings. Humans need to know what causes things to happen; they also need to understand the effects of what happens. This curiosity first manifests itself in childhood, with questions such as, “Why is the sky blue?” and “What happens if I don’t eat my vegetables?” This curiosity is a constant as humans continue to seek the answers to questions such as “why?” and “what?” Causes are the answers to "Why?" Causes explain the reasons why things are the way they are. Effects are the answers to "What?" Effects explain the results of what happened. Causes, in other words, are similar to reasons or stimuli; effects are similar to results or consequences.

As shown in the photographs above, cause and effect are sometimes readily apparent. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy (the immediate cause) bludgeoned New York City and its environs with its winds and sea surge, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and more than 200,000 vehicles (the immediate effect). Of course, an event of this scale has multiple causes and effects. For example, a remote cause of the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy in New York and most of the Eastern Seaboard is the rising sea levels brought about by climate change. The remote effects of the damage have yet to be seen, but they will include higher taxes brought about by the expense of clean up.

In this chapter, you will learn how to identify the causes and effects of different phenomena, trends, or issues. You will practice prewriting techniques such as listing, determining audience and purpose, and developing causal chains. In addition, you will get practice in organizing and drafting a cause and effect essay. You will be shown the differences between types of causes and types of effects, including immediate and remote causes and effects.

Prewriting Techniques

In college or at work, when you are asked to identify and explain causes and effects, it is helpful to begin by listing them. Typically, there will be a few causes and effects that come to mind right away, but the process of listing often uncovers several more. Here is a sample list created for an analysis of the causes and effects of obesity.

After you have listed potential causes and effects and determined your audience and purpose, it is time to decide on your main idea, which will be one or more of the causes or effects. The main idea for an assignment identifying the causes of obesity could be, "The primary cause of obesity is genetic." The main idea for an assignment identifying the effects of obesity could be, "Coronary heart disease is the primary effect of obesity."

In the example sentences below, the main idea stated in the topic sentence is that genetic factors are the most important determinants of obesity. To support this claim convincingly, you must identify and explain more than one genetic factor. Two factors, in other words, would be the minimum number needed for adequate support; four or more factors would probably result in an unwieldy paragraph. In the example sentences below, notice how many words explicitly state or imply causality.

Topic Sentence: Genetic factors play the most important role in determining whether or not a person becomes overweight or obese.

Supporting Point 1: Genes govern the rate of our metabolism, which regulates the body’s ability and need to store body fat; increased levels of body fat result in weight gain.

Supporting Point 2: Genetic mutations could cause some individuals to overeat; overeating leads to weight gain.

Supporting Point 3: Variations in genes could also predispose some people to avoid exercise; lack of exercise slows the metabolism and causes weight gain.

Below is an example discussing the primary effects of legalizing the sale of human organs.

Effective Transitional Words

Skillful writers understand the value of transitional words and phrases. Use the following transitional words or phrases to tighten the connections between causes and effects, sentences, and paragraphs. The effective use of transitional words and phrases strengthens the cohesiveness of your argument and the readability of your paper.

Choose an Organizational Strategy

Competent writers know that an important early step in preparing to write an outline and first draft is to decide on the most effective way to organize their ideas and evidence. Depending on your audience, purpose, and main idea, you can choose to write about one cause or one effect; you can choose to write about several causes or several effects; or you can choose to write about causes and effects together.

The connections between causes and effects that are developed in an essay or oral argument are called a causal chain.

In the above examples of causal chains, notice how transition words and phrases connect the links and help readers to understand how each statement follows from the preceding one.

If you were to write about climate change, for instance, you might organize your paper as shown in the following flow chart. This approach allows you to show how rising temperatures are resulting in several significant environmental effects.

If you were to write about the societal causes that have led to declining literacy rates, you might organize your paper as shown below.

Practice Exercise

Outlining Cause and Effect Essays

Once you have completed the prewriting tasks of identifying the topic, audience, purpose, and main idea, you may find it helpful to organize your ideas in an outline. An outline for a cause and effect essay about a role model might look something like this:

1. Introduction
   1. Hook
      1. As the oldest of eight children growing up on a tiny farm in the poorest part of Ireland, my father knew few of the carefree pleasures of childhood. Whenever he was not studying in the one-room schoolhouse that served as the village’s grammar school, he labored in the fields from sunrise to sunset.
   2. Background Information
      1. After his father died suddenly, my father had to leave Ireland in order to find a steady job that could support his mother and younger siblings. Packing everything he owned in a battered valise, he sailed for America in search of opportunity.
   3. Thesis
      1. In undertaking this risky journey, my father displayed character traits that have influenced and inspired me throughout my life: courage, industriousness, and optimism.
2. Body Paragraph 1
   1. Topic Sentence: My father showed courage when he decided to leave his home to make a new life for himself in New York City.
   2. Compare size and pace of NYC to his tiny village.
   3. Describe his loneliness.
   4. Explain how his courage influenced me.
3. Body Paragraph 2
   1. Topic Sentence: My father’s industriousness has inspired me to push on even when exhausted.
   2. Describe his first job.
   3. Immigrant labor built the Transcontinental Railroad.
   4. Explain how his work ethic was a model to emulate.
4. Body Paragraph 3
   1. Topic Sentence: My father’s optimism and “can-do” spirit have always been inspirational to me.
   2. My father left everyone he loved to come to a world where he knew not a soul.
   3. He believed in the promise of the future, and that the children he hoped to have would have a better childhood than he had.
   4. Explain how his optimism inspired me.
5. Conclusion
   1. Risking everything to help his mother, brothers, and sisters, my father displayed a strength of character that has influenced and inspired me in many ways.
   2. Recap how my father’s life affected mine.

Based on this outline, the writer composed the following introduction paragraph: As the oldest of eight children growing up on a tiny farm in the poorest part of Ireland, my father knew few of the carefree pleasures of childhood. Whenever he was not studying in the one-room schoolhouse that served as the village’s grammar school, he labored in the fields from sunrise to sunset. After his father died suddenly, my father had to leave Ireland in order to find a steady job that could support his mother and younger siblings. Packing everything he owned in a battered valise, he sailed for America in search of opportunity. In undertaking this risky journey, my father displayed character traits that have influenced and inspired me throughout my life: courage, industriousness, and optimism.

Practice Exercise

Adding Resonance

The example outline and paragraph are satisfactory in nearly every respect: They are coherent, concise, and clear. The writer effectively shows how his father served as a role model by displaying character traits (i.e., causes) that influenced and inspired (i.e., effects) the writer. If the outline and paragraph have a flaw, it is that they do not pass the “So What?” test.

This question should be asked of virtually every type of communication because it is desirable to avoid content that might be trivial or too narrowly focused to be of interest to people other than the writer. In this example, the student has written a personal story about how the father was a role model. Readers who do not know the student or the father might not be able to relate to this story; they might stop reading early in the essay and ask, “So what?”

To broaden the appeal of your essays, it is beneficial to add resonance, which is a quality of writing that makes things significant or interesting to readers. Writing has resonance when universal emotions and ideas are generated by particular settings, events, and characters. In James Cameron’s film Titanic, for instance, in the specific and personal disagreements between Rose and her pompous fiancé, we recognize the different expectations that men and women in general have about the universal theme of equality between the sexes.

To add resonance to the student's story, the student decided to connect the specific and personal experiences of the father to the universal theme of the immigrant experience in America. Review the outline to see how resonance has been added to broaden the topic.

1. Introduction
   1. Hook
      1. As the oldest of eight children growing up on a tiny farm in the poorest part of Ireland, my father knew few of the carefree pleasures of childhood. Whenever he was not studying in the one-room schoolhouse that served as the village’s grammar school, he labored in the fields from sunrise to sunset.
   2. Background Information
      1. After his father died suddenly, my father, who was then 18, decided to leave Ireland in order to find a steady job that could support his widowed mother and younger siblings. Packing everything he owned in a battered valise, he sailed for America—a journey taken by millions of people of every nationality who sought opportunity in a new world.
   3. Thesis
      1. In undertaking this risky journey, my father displayed personal strengths that influenced me, strengths similar to those possessed by other immigrants throughout history: courage, industriousness, and optimism.
2. Body Paragraph 1
   1. Topic Sentence: As so many other immigrants who came to America before and after him, my father showed courage when he decided to leave his home to make a new life for himself in New York City.
   2. Compare size and pace of NYC to his tiny village.
   3. Explain how I was influenced by his courage.
3. Body Paragraph 2
   1. Topic Sentence: Historically, immigrants like my father have been industrious.
   2. Describe his first job working 72 hours per week for $66.
   3. Immigrant labor built the Transcontinental Railroad.
   4. Explain how I was affected by his industriousness.
4. Body Paragraph 3
   1. Topic Sentence: America prides itself on its optimism and “can-do” spirit, and the people who embody that more than any other are immigrants like my father.
   2. My father left everyone he loved to come to a world where he knew not a soul.
   3. He believed in the promise of the future, and that the children he hoped to have would have a better childhood than he had.
   4. Explain how I was inspired by his optimism.
5. Conclusion
   1. Throughout our history, immigrants like my father have come to America with few material possessions but with hearts filled with courage, industriousness, and optimism, traits that have inspired and influenced me profoundly.
   2. Mention contributions of immigrants (e.g., Alexander Hamilton).
   3. Call for immigration reform.

The additional information the writer included in the outline broadens the appeal of the essay. Based on the outline that now includes resonance, here is the writer's revised introduction paragraph:

As the oldest of eight children growing up on a tiny farm in the poorest part of Ireland, my father knew few of the carefree joys of childhood. When he was not studying in the village’s one-room schoolhouse, he labored in the fields and bogs from sunrise to sunset. After his father died suddenly, my father, who was then 18, decided to leave Ireland in order to find a steady job that could support his mother and siblings. Packing everything he owned in a battered valise, he sailed for America—a journey taken by millions of people of every nationality in search of opportunity in a new world. In undertaking this risky journey, my father displayed personal strengths that influenced me, strengths similar to those possessed by other immigrants throughout history: courage, industriousness, and optimism.

Practice Exercise

The writer's final cause and effect essay about his father that adheres to GCU style on a role model, based on the outline created throughout this section, might look like this:

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Practice Exercise

Critical-Thinking Applications

The ability to think critically requires an understanding of causality. Critical thinking demands that you understand the differences between cause and correlation, effects and coincidences. Thinking critically about cause and effect is an essential component of many different forms of written communication. Thinking critically about causes and effects can be applied to important and prevalent types of writing.

In a world that is growing more interconnected every day, it is vitally important to think clearly and with foresight about the global causes and effects of our actions. For example, loosely written regulations for the banking and finance industry, which resulted in numerous loopholes that were exploited by greedy and unscrupulous financiers, led to the subprime mortgage crisis, which, in turn, forced gigantic Wall Street institutions to declare bankruptcy or seek a government bailout. The shock waves from the crisis triggered the “Great Recession,” which eventually hurt the economy of virtually every nation on earth.

The ability to identify and explain causes and effects is an important one to hone. Regardless of your major, your ability in this area will benefit you during college, as you will call on it for reading assignments, essays, research papers, and lab reports. Listing causes and effects of a phenomenon, as you did in exercises in this chapter, is an excellent way to prepare for a test or a classroom discussion.

Individuals who know how to identify and explain causes and effects are highly valued in every field, from nursing to law enforcement. Business owners and executives, in particular, are continually analyzing reasons and results: “Why did we lose that client?” “What impact will that have on profitability?” “Why did this marketing campaign succeed?” “What are the implications of our rapid growth?”

Journalists, political pundits, self-help gurus, historians, psychologists, commentators, and economists all incorporate analysis of cause and effect into their writing. “Why did this candidate defeat his or her opponent?” “What will be the effects on my retirement account of the proposed changes to tax law?” “Why did so many soldiers and civilians die in World War I?” “What will be the long-term effects of Russia’s annexation of Crimea?”

Virtually all forms of personal writing, from private correspondence to confidential journals, involve analysis of cause and effect at one time or another. “Why did my boyfriend break up with me?” “What will happen to my children if I get a divorce?” We read the memoirs of famous people in large part to understand more clearly the reasons for and results of their actions.

Conclusion

The human need to understand causes and effects is innate. Curiosity about “why” and “what” is the engine that drives progress and encourages creativity. In this chapter, you learned how to communicate in writing your understanding of causes and effects of different phenomena, trends, and issues. The aptitude you have gained will benefit you not only in future college courses but also in your personal lives and professional careers.

Examples

One of the most common effects of obesity is back pain. The extra weight carried by obese people places a terrible strain on the muscles in their backs. For most obese people, the greatest amount of excess weight is found in the midsection. The extra weight in the midsection pulls the body forward. Since our bodies were designed to stand and walk upright, the added weight in the midsection upsets the body’s natural posture, throwing it out of balance. The unnatural posture results in muscle strain and back aches because muscles are being asked to do more than they were designed to do. As long as the person remains obese, there are few alternative treatment regimens for back pain available to doctors because exercise and physical therapy, in most cases, would only compound the problem. This leaves doctors with little choice but to prescribe addictive pain medications such as Vicodin, a course of action that could make bad problems, such as obesity and backaches, even worse.

References

Aesop. (1867). The fox and the crow. Aesop's Fables (Lit2Go Edition). Retrieved from http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/394/the-fox-and-the-crow/

Capland, A. (2014). Organ transplantation. Retrieved from http://www.thehastingscenter.org/

Living Kidney Donor Death/Mortality. (2012, February). Retrieved from http://www.livingdonor101.com/kidney-donor-death.shtml

Rothman, S. M., & Rothman, D. J. (2006). The hidden cost of organ sales. American Journal of Transplantation, 6(7), 1524-1529.

Titmuss R. M. (1971). The gift relationship: From human blood to social policy. New York: Vintage Books.

Wilkinson, S. (2012)., The sale of human organs, In E. N. Zalta (Ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: The Metaphysics Research Lab. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/organs-sale