| HOME | Project Management Data Warehousing / Mining Software Testing | Technical Writing |
|
I’m disorganized because my mother’s always been super- organized. We wouldn’t have lost if he hadn’t fouled out. If they win the election, taxes will go up. All of us are constantly crediting or blaming A for causing B or predicting that C will result in D, and in ordinary conversation this free-swinging approach usually goes unchallenged. When you write, though, your readers have time to examine and think about what you have to say. If the causal (not casual) connection you assert doesn’t make sense, they’ll reject it. If it’s sensible enough but you pro vide no evidence to back it up, they’ll treat it as no more than a possibility. Causal connections help give coherence to material that’s organized chronologically — sets of instructions and descriptions of processes as well as narratives told for their own sake. In a paper on a natural process like soil drifting, you generate content by asking yourself why the drifting takes place. By explaining why—by providing the causal statement— you help your reader understand the whole process. In other papers cause-effect analysis is the chief method of development. The writer searches out the causes of (or reasons for) an event or situation or policy or belief. He traces the effects (or results or influences) it has had or will have. Or he conducts both inquiries in the same paper, first setting forth the events that led to a certain state of affairs, then revealing what developments have ensued or predicting what developments will ensue. In an essay on the causes of student apathy toward politics or the psychological effects of abortion, the writer’s interest is centered not so much on the situation itself as on what led to it or on what it led to or will lead to. His main concern is to present, and perhaps argue for, the relationships and connections he’s arrived at by reasoning about origins and results. Like any other kind of reasoning, reasoning in terms of cause and effect can be done well or badly. If you approach a cause-effect analysis too blithely, you’re likely to over simplify: bureaucracy is to blame for high taxes; slavery caused the Civil War; the poor representation of women in top executive positions is the result of male chauvinism; progressive legislation will put an end to all sexual discrimination. You’ll match one cause to one effect, often without providing any evidence that your one cause is, in fact, a cause at all, and in that way turn what should be a reasoned discussion into a dogmatic statement of opinion. Or, convinced that only an omniscient being can assign causes or attribute results, you may refuse to commit yourself. You load your discussion with cautious qualifications, present an endless list of “possible” causes, or trace the “possible” immediate causes back to such re mote and virtually meaningless causes as “civilization,” “chance,” or “human nature”—thus World War II (or World War I or the Trojan War or the Vietnam War) was caused by human nature. Whether your tendency Is to oversimplify or to over-qualify, you need to develop a realistic notion of how to go about answering why questions. Discovering Causes The procedure in answering why questions always involves two steps—investigating the facts and reasoning from the facts to a causal explanation. Anyone accustomed to thinking of cause-effect relations in the context of scientific experiments knows that two phenomena are causally related only if the existence of one requires the existence of the other. A causal relation between A and B can be established with certainty only if it can be demonstrated that whenever B occurs, A is present; that B never occurs when A is absent; and that the presence of A is always accompanied by the occurrence of B. A laboratory worker tries to isolate all variables and then puts strict controls on one variable after another until eventually he determines what condition or set of conditions operates as a cause. He runs experiments again and again until he either verifies or disproves his hypothesis—his hunch or guess that A is the cause of B. In attempting to answer many of the why questions that matter most to us, we can’t set up controlled laboratory experiments. We can’t call into existence the actual circumstances in which a fatal accident took place or a game was lost or a war was won. And even if we could rerun such happenings, we would rarely be able to isolate a single cause that inevitably led to the given effect. “In the world of reality,” a logician observes, “there is no such thing as the cause of anything. There are many causes, or necessary antecedents, for everything that happens.” An investigation into the collision of two cars may have to take into account such necessary antecedents as weather, traffic, and road conditions, the mechanical condition of the cars, and the competence of the drivers. The investigator may be able to demonstrate that one of many contributory causes had a more immediate connection with the accident than the others and was in itself sufficient to have caused the accident. But he may have to be satisfied with listing three or four contributory causes, none of which can be said to have been decisive. When you’re writing about social and moral problems like alcoholism, drug addiction, the divorce rate, the failures of our educational system or the system we use for dealing with crime, and the hardships faced by many of our old people, you’ll probably want to list several causes, not just one, and distinguish immediate causes from remote ones. In a thoroughgoing causal analysis you may need to examine the evidence for conflicting explanations, show that a commonly accepted cause can’t be held solely responsible, distinguish between conditions that made an event likely to occur and conditions that triggered the event, perhaps rank contributory causes in order of importance—any or all of these. In any case, your reader will be interested not just in the list of causes you offer but in your demonstration that there’s a probable relationship between each cause you cite and the effect. Merely asserting causal connections isn’t enough: you must supply enough details to join “cause” to “effect.” Causal analysis usually has an argumentative edge. There’s no point in writing about cause- effect relations that are obvious to everyone (touching a hot stove causes pain). There is some point in exploring relationships which can, when shown to be probable, increase a reader’s understanding of the subject and suggest solutions as well. (Why do so many students have difficulty with math? Why has the Midwest lost industries to the “sun states”? Why have there been a number of car-truck collisions on Amato Road within a period of weeks?) And it’s demonstration, not mere assertion, that establishes probability — demonstration in the form of concrete, relevant details and facts that knit cause to effect. Attributing Effects You’ll want to concern yourself primarily with effects in two different writing situations. In one you work from a current state of affairs or a current policy to its effects (the effects of coed housing, For example), with a view to arguing that since the effects have been desirable, the state of affairs or the policy should be continued, or that since the effects have been undesirable, the state of affairs or the policy should be changed. Here, the procedure is much like the one you’d use in discovering causes and in persuading readers that your analysis was plausible. As in identifying causes, you must take care not to attribute to one cause a condition that might just as logically be the effect of another cause. Good relations in a housing unit may be less the result of social arrangements than of pleasant surroundings and a fair distribution of responsibilities. In the second writing situation you predict effects as part of your argument for accepting or rejecting a pro posed policy. The element of prediction imposes on the responsible writer the need to bring in all the evidence he can to show that the results he projects are likely to occur. We’re all familiar with predictions about the bad consequences that will flow from courses of action or habits that the speakers or writers don’t approve of—continued at tempts to integrate schools will destroy the American educational system; rock concerts will deafen a generation; anti-pollution legislation will wreck the economy; television will wipe out literacy; and so on. The political candidate’s routine prediction of horrendous consequences if his opponent should be elected is not taken seriously by many intelligent voters. To make sure your analysis of effects is taken seriously, make every effort to proportion effects to causes (field mice don’t cause land slides) and to establish through detailed evidence reason able links between the policy or event or situation and the results you say it will bring about. Tracing a sequence of probable effects, linking one effect to another, is a natural way of making predictions. Although the following passage isn’t a full discussion of the complex subject, it gives a good idea, in summary fashion, of how a scientist interprets a phenomenon, reasoning from a limited effect to a much more sweeping one. Throughout the eons, habitats have undergone frequent change, and Lepidoptera, like other life forms, have become extinct through the processes of evolution. According to the new preservationist society which has adopted its name, however, Xerces blue is “the first butterfly to become extinct in North America due to human impact.” Modern man’s impact on butterflies, as well as other harmless insects, is of deep concern to many scientists today. Their reasoning goes something like this: About the only way man can totally eliminate a butterfly or moth species from the earth— intentionally or accidentally—is by destroying its habitat (which contains its food plant), leaving no possibility for regeneration in the foreseeable future, as when a meadow is paved for a shop ping mall, a woodland cleared for a subdivision or a marsh drained for an industrial site. This habitat, however, is not the butterfly’s alone. It’s something the butterfly has shared with other living creatures, including man. And when man thus molds a habitat to his exclusive use, asserting his claims there over those of all the other life forms in it, he is destroying his natural environment as well as theirs. So It isn’t just a question of the butterfly’s world going down the drain; the world in which man in his present form has been able to flourish so successfully for half a million years or so is going down the drain, too, leaving in its place a very dubious synthetic substitute. It’s with such a set of interlocking relation ships in mind that Robert M. Pyle, the Xerces Society’s executive director, has called butterflies “excellent monitors of environ mental change and of rises in pollution levels.” From this view point, moths and butterflies are the barometers of our industrial civilization; their elimination from our human habitat is a danger signal we must heed.—Paul Showers, New York Times Magazine • For Analysis and Writing 1. “At night the noise in the dorm makes sleeping, as well as studying, almost impossible.” Take this statement or a similar one based on your own experience and develop a paper in which you first investigate the causes of the situation and then discuss its effects. You might go on to propose a remedy. Your audience is the director of housing on campus. 2. To support his contention that the side effects of technical innovation may be more influential than the direct effects in transforming the behavior, outlook, and moral ethic of a civilization, Jacob Bronowski in 1969 used this illustration: Who would have thought that the unfortunate character who invented photographic film would have been responsible for the California film industry? And thus, indirectly, for contracts that would prevent film stars from having affairs that might give rise to gossip and scandal? That consequently stars would lead their love life in public, by repeated divorce and marriage? That therefore the beautiful pin-ups of film would, in time, become the models of the divorce business? And the climax, that one- third of all marriages contracted this year in California are going to end in divorce—all because somebody invented the process of printing pictures on a celluloid strip?—Jacob Bronowski, Saturday Review First comment on the Bronowski paragraph as causal analysis, and then try your hand at the same sort of thing. Write a paper -- serious or humorous -- showing the unanticipated side effects of a recent discovery or policy. top of page Home Similar Articles |