cause and effect

A method of paragraph or essay development in which a writer analyzes the reasons for (and/or the consequences of) an action, event, or decision. See also:

• 40 Essay Topics: Cause & Effect
• Cause and Effect in Stephen King's "Horror Movies"
• Cause and Effect in "The Dream Animal" by Loren Eiseley
• Sentence Combining Exercise #7: Out of the Ice Age
• Learning to Hate Mathematics: A Cause & Effect Essay
• "Changes," by Peter Matthiessen
• Sentence Combining Exercise #8: "How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading"
• "Corn-Pone Opinions," by Mark Twain
• "The Decay of Friendship," by Samuel Johnson

Examples and Observations:

• "If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause."
  (Aristotle, Rhetoric)



• "I worry about the private automobile. It is a dirty, noisy, wasteful, and lonely means of travel. It pollutes the air, ruins the safety and sociability of the street, and exercises upon the individual a discipline which takes away far more freedom than it gives him. It causes an enormous amount of land to be unnecessarily abstracted from nature and from plant life and to become devoid of any natural function. It explodes cities, grievously impairs the whole institution of neighborliness, fragmentizes and destroys communities. It has already spelled the end of our cities as real cultural and social communities, and has made impossible the construction of any others in their place. Together with the airplane, it has crowded out other, more civilized and more convenient means of transport, leaving older people, infirm people, poor people and children in a worse situation than they were a hundred years ago."
  (George F. Kennan)