Cause/Effect Video Lecture

Today’s writing lesson is on cause and effect essays. When we talk about a cause essay, we’re talking about what makes something happen. A synonym is reason. When we talk about an effect essay, we’re talking about what happens as a result. And when you write this kind of essay, you’re only going to write about the causes, or only about the effects. You’re not going to write about both in one essay. Just like with any essay, before you start writing, you need to prepare. We’re going to think about our topic and we’re going to think about all of the causes and all of the effects of our topic. When we’re thinking about the effects we’re asking ourself, what happens when? Let’s take the topic of eating too much. Eating too much we could call this the cause. And then, what are the effects of that? Well, when you eat too much you get full. Also, when you eat too much, maybe you get a stomach ache. Over time, you even get fat from eating too much. So those are effects of eating too much. When we write a cause essay, we think about why something happens. Let’s take the topic of getting sick. This could be called the effect and then what are the causes of getting sick? Well, maybe I was around somebody else who was sick and maybe I have a bad diet, I don’t healthy so I got sick. Or maybe I don’t exercise well enough, or I don’t get enough sleep. Those could be the causes of getting sick. Just like with any essay, we need to have a good, strong thesis statement. For a thesis statement in a cause and effect essay, we need to indicate what we are writing about as well as whether we’re going to write about causes or effects. So in a thesis statement, your topic would be whatever it is you’re writing about maybe getting sick or eating too much. And then the controlling idea would be that we’re going to talk about causes. Or that we’re going to talk about effects. Like we’ve talked about before your thesis statement can also indicate what the body paragraphs will be about but you don’t have to do that. This is a kind of outline for a cause essay. In your introduction, you mention the topic that’s in your thesis statement, you’ll say what it is you’re writing about. And then, each body paragraph will be one of the causes. So you need to have a cause that’s not so specific that you can’t think of anything to write about it. In each of your body paragraphs, you have to give the details about that cause. And you develop these body paragraphs the same way you have developed body paragraphs in the past. So each cause, you would have a topic sentence, supporting ideas and details and you do that for the next cause and the next cause. You could have more than three body paragraphs but you need at least three. And then your conclusion will be a summary or restatement of the main points. Here’s another topic for a cause essay. This is about people studying a second or third language. If you want to think about the causes, ask yourself why do people do this. Maybe they want to get a better job. Maybe they want to interact internationally or maybe they just want to do something for themselves to improve themselves. So, the answers to the question why, gives you your causes. This is what the effects essay looks like in an outline form. You introduce the topic in the first paragraph and then each body paragraph will be one effect. Here is a sample topic for an effect essay, this is about the stock market crashing, ask yourself what happens when the stock market crashes, and the answers that we get will be the effects. So what happens after a stock market crash? People get scared and they take their money out of the stock market. The government is also scared so it makes regulations to prevent another crash. And companies also are scared, so they shrink. That means they get smaller and they lay off employees. So these answers to the question what happens when, are the effects of something. Planning is really important for any essay. If you plan well, you’re more likely to have a good essay. So for this assignment you should do some pre-writing to figure out whether you’re going to be writing causes or effects in your essay. Remember to put only one cause or only one effect in each body paragraph. And then make an outline so that you know if you’ve got enough to write about. Remember the T-chart that we used for comparison essays, you can use that also for a cause and effect essay. Put your topic at the top. Put causes on one side and effects on the other. List them here. When you’re planning, you don’t have to know if you’re doing causes or effects. You may not know. So use a T-chart and just list all of the causes you can think of and all of the effects that you can think of. And then you’ll see which list you like better. If you have more causes or maybe the causes are better. Then you might want to write a cause essay. If you see that you have more effects then you would write about the effects. And then put your information into an outline. You would have each cause for one of the, a cause for each of these numbers. And then these would be your details about that cause or the effect.