5 Steps for your Best Cause and Effect Essay

Cause and Effect Essay

Step 1: Understanding the Cause and Effect Essay Definition

A cause and effect essay is written with the purpose of analyzing the causes and/or effects of a single event. Depending on the exact nature of the assignment, a student may focus solely on causes, solely on effects, or equally on both. The process of writing in the cause and effect essay format can be deceptively difficult.

Step 2: Selecting a Cause and Effect Essay Topic

To get started, you will need to select an event or subject to research and analyze.  As mentioned above, you might choose to write only about the causes, only about the effects, or you may wish to write about both. Here are few events and subjects that you may want to consider when choosing your topic:

• The Civil War
• The Rise of the Islamic State
• The Great Depression
• World War II
• The Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The Renewal of Relations between the United States and Cuba
• Poverty
• Hunger
• Divorce
• Domestic Violence
• Getting a College Education
• Dropping out of High School
• Teenage Pregnancy
• Helicopter Parenting
• Overpopulation
• Having a Family Member with Cancer
• Losing a Job

Step 3: Deciding How to Start a Cause and Effect Essay

Starting an essay is always challenging. As with other essay formats, you could begin with an attention getter. This could possibly be a statistic about your topic, or an interesting story that you use as a lead in to your introduction. Once you have figured out how you are going to open your introductory paragraph, you can let your audience know what your topic is, a little bit of information about your topic, and whether or not you will examine the causes, the effects, or both.

Step 4: Avoiding Cause and Effect Scope Explosion

Every event or phenomena that happens is triggered by other events. That event in turn triggers other events and phenomena. If you are writing a cause and effect essay, it is very easy to find yourself caught in a cycle of analyzing the effects of one event, then the effects of the event that event triggered, and so on and so forth. At this point, your paper could go on forever. In order to avoid this, you must stick to a single event and the events that caused it or the effects of that single event. If you go beyond one iteration, you are going to be in trouble.

Step 5: Writing an Essay

The final step is simply writing your essay. You start this by researching, taking notes, writing an outline, and then writing your essay. If you’ve written essays before, this is surely a familiar process to you. Just keep the steps above in mind, and you should do fine. However, if you do need help, please remember that trustmypaper.com has writers available to help you with all of your essay writing needs. Don’t stress. Simply fill out an order form on our website and we can get started.