Before you can write a cause-and-effect argument, you need to understand the nature of cause-and-effect relationships, some of which can be very complex. For one thing, a single event or situation can have many possible results, and not all of these will be equally significant. In the same way, identifying causes can be particularly challenging because an event or situation can have more than one cause. For example, many factors might explain why more Americans do not vote. (The diagram below illustrates some possible causes.)
Main and Contributory Causes
In a cause-and-effect argument, your focus is on identifying the cause you believe is the most important and presenting arguments to convince readers why it is the most important (and why other causes are not as important).
The most important cause is the main cause; the less important causes are contributory causes. Typically, you will present the main cause as your key argument in support of your thesis, and you will identify the contributory causes elsewhere in your argument. (You may also identify factors that are not causes and explain why they are not.)
Identifying the main cause is not always easy; the most important cause may not always be the most obvious one. However, you need to figure out which cause is most important so you can structure and support your essay with this emphasis in mind.
Immediate and Remote Causes
As mentioned earlier, identifying the main cause of a particular effect can be difficult because the most important cause is not necessarily the most obvious one. Usually, the most obvious cause is the immediate cause—the one that occurs right before an event. For example, a political scandal that erupts the day before an election might cause many disillusioned voters to stay home from the polls. However, this immediate cause, although it is the most obvious, may be less important than one or more remote causes —factors that occurred further in the past but may have had a greater impact.
Causal Chains
A causal chain is a sequence of events in which one event causes the next, which in turn causes the next, and so on. For example, the problem of Americans who do not vote can be presented as a causal chain.
When you write a cause-and-effect argument, you can organize your essay as a causal chain, as the following outline illustrates.
Thesis statement: Because they do not encourage students to see voting as a civic duty, U.S. high schools are at least partly to blame for the low turnout in many elections.
High schools do not stress the importance of elections.
As a result, students do not follow election coverage in the media.
Because they do not follow election coverage, students have little knowledge of the issues.
With little knowledge of the issues, students do not understand that it is important to vote.
Because they do not see voting as important, young adults do not develop a habit of regular voting.
As a result, American adults are less likely to vote.
Post Hoc Reasoning
Post hoc reasoning is the incorrect assumption that because an event precedes another event, it has caused that event. For example, you may notice that few of your friends voted in a recent election, and you may realize that many of your friends had previously decided to become science majors. This does not mean, of course, that their decision to choose careers in science has made them nonvoters. In fact, a scientist can be very interested in electoral politics. As you develop your cause-and-effect argument, be careful not to assume that every event that precedes another event has somehow caused it. (For information on avoiding post hoc fallacies, see Chapter 5.)
