Chapter 10 Cause and Effect

Chapter 10, Cause and Effect, discusses the factors, planning, structuring and revising of a cause and effect essay. Rather than describing how something happens such as in a process essay, cause and effect essays analyze why something happens and either examine causes, explain the effects or do both within the essay. When examining the situation in which is being examined, it is important to effectively distinguish between the correct causes and effects, as some situations include many causes or many effects. Identifying the causes can be difficult, as determining the main cause and the contributory causes is very important to the structure of the essay. Although the main cause is sometimes the obvious one, this is not always the case. In addition, one must understand the immediate and remote causes. Immediate causes follow closely before the effect while remote causes may take time to recognize due to the fact that they can happen much further back in the past. It is crucial when determining immediate and remote causes that one does not assume that the immediate cause is the most important or the main cause. When effects are also causes, this is called a causal chain. When causal chains occur, the result of one action is the cause of another, forming a link of chains. Another factor to consider is post hoc reasoning which should be avoided at all causes. Post hoc reasoning occurs when one event precedes another and is thought to cause the event simply because it came before. In post hoc reasoning, coincidence is mistaken for causality.

Although I had thought I had known all about the factors regarding a cause and effect essay, this chapter informed me of a lot of aspects I did not know about. For example, I never realized there could be so many different ways to structure a cause and effect essay such as through describing the less important causes to the most important or distinguishing between the immediate and remote causes. I also did not know previously that an important part of describing the effects in a cause and effect essay was predicting the outcome of certain effects. One critical part of this chapter for me was the grammar in context section which it discussed how to use affect and effect correctly because I realize that many people have a hard time with this problem. Additionally, I believe that an important tip of this chapter was to not just assume that the immediate cause is the main and most important cause because it can lead to misleading conclusions.