CHAPTER 16Paragraph Development:(3) Cause and Effect

CauseOne cannot write for very long without having to explainwhy something happened or why it is true or false. There arenumerous strategies for developing causes or reasons.1 Thesimplest is to ask the question "Why?" and then to supplythe answer:

If, then, the language of the original colonists was merely the En-glish of England, why does ours differ somewhat from theirs today?Three reasons can be offered.

First, the people of Great Britain in the seventeenth century spokedifferent local dialects. What we now consider to be standard En-glish for England developed from the language of London and thenear-by counties. But the settlers of America came not only fromthat region but also from many others. New England was settledlargely from the eastern counties. Pennsylvania received a heavyimmigration from the north of Ireland. English as it came to bespoken in New England and much of Pennsylvania thus naturallywas not the same English that developed as the standard in England.For instance in what we consider typical British English of today,

1. Cause and reason are not strict synonyms: the former is more general andincludes the latter. But we'll use them interchangeably.

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the final r has been lost. It is, however, partially preserved in Gen-eral American, possibly because the Scotch-Irish of the eighteenthcentury preserved that sound, as they still do in Ireland.

A second cause for the difference between the two countries liesin mere isolation. Language is always changing. When two groupsof people speaking the same language are separated and remain incomparative isolation, change continues in the language of bothgroups, but naturally it does not continue in the same direction andat the same rate with both of them. The languages thus tend tobecome different.

Third, the language in the United States has been subjected tovarious influences that have not affected the language in Great Brit-ain—the environment, the languages of other early colonists andof later immigrants. George R. Stewart

Development by reasons may be more subtle. Instead ofusing a question-answer strategy and explicitly announcingreasons, a writer may leave the causal relationships implicit.The connection exists in the substructure of ideas but is notspelled out. In the following paragraph, for instance, only the"for" in the opening sentence makes the idea of causality ex-plicit:

The cult of beauty in women, which we smile at as though it wereone of the culture's harmless follies, is, in fact, an insanity, for it isposited on a false view of reality. Women are not more beautifulthan men. The obligation to be beautiful is an artificial burden,imposed by men on women, that keeps both sexes clinging to child-hood, the woman forced to remain a charming, dependent child,the man driven by his unconscious desire to be—like an infant—loved and taken care of simply for his beautiful self. Woman's maskof beauty is the face of a child, a revelation of the tragic sexualimmaturity of both sexes in our culture. Una stannard

Ordering Reasons within the ParagraphSometimes you will work with only a single reason, repeatingor expanding it in various ways: this is what Una Stannarddoes in the preceding paragraph. Other topics involve several

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reasons, as in the passage by Professor Stewart. In that caseyou must arrange them in a significant order. If the causes areserial—that is, if A is caused by B, B by C, and C by D—theorganization is predetermined: A—B—C—D.

But several reasons all contributing to the same conse-quence may be parallel, that is, having no causal connectionwithin themselves and related only in all contributing to thesame result. (Again, the passage by Professor Stewart is anexample.) With parallel reasons you have more choice of ar-rangement. If they have an order in time, you will probablyfollow that. If they do not, you will probably have to rankthe reasons in order of importance, usually, though not in-variably, leading up to the most important:

I doubt if the English temperament is wholly favourable to the de-velopment of the essayist. In the first place, an Anglo-Saxon likesdoing things better than thinking about them; and in his memories,he is apt to recall how a thing was done rather than why it wasdone. In the next place, we are naturally rather prudent and secre-tive; we say that a man must not wear his heart upon his sleeve,and that is just what the essayist must do. We have a horror ofgiving ourselves away, and we like to keep ourselves to ourselves."The Englishman's home is his castle," says another proverb. Butthe essayist must not have a castle, or if he does, both the groundsand the living-rooms must be open to the inspection of thepublic. A. C. Benson

Reversing the order of Benson's two reasons would not im-pair the logic of his paragraph. However, it would disrupt theclimactic structure. While Benson nowhere says that he con-siders the second reason more important, he gives it morethan twice the space and repeats it three times.

EffectsEffects or consequences2 are handled much the same as rea-sons. But now the topic idea is regarded as causing the con-

2. These terms, too, will be used synonymously.

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sequences discussed in the remainder of the paragraph. Theparagraph may treat only a single effect, as in this passageabout the moon affecting the tides:

If the moon were suddenly struck out of existence, we should beimmediately appraised of the fact by a wail from every seaport inthe kingdom. From London and from Liverpool we should hear thesame story—the rise and fall of the tide had almost ceased. Theships in dock could not get out; the ships outside could not get in;and the maritime commerce of the world would be thrown intodire confusion. Robert Ball

Multiple EffectsOften, however, a topic entails several effects, not just one,as in the following case (the writer is concerned with whatthe automobile has done to our society):

Thirdly, I worry about the private automobile. It is a dirty, noisy,wasteful, and lonely means of travel. It pollutes the air, ruins thesafety and sociability of the street, and exercises upon the individuala discipline which takes away far more freedom than it gives him.It causes an enormous amount of land to be unnecessarily ab-stracted from nature and from plant life and to become devoid ofany natural function. It explodes cities, grievously impairs thewhole institution of neighborliness, fragmentizes and destroys com-munities. It has already spelled the end of our cities as real culturaland social communities, and has made impossible the constructionof any others in their place. Together with the airplane, it hascrowded out other, more civilized and more convenient means oftransport, leaving older people, infirm people, poor people andchildren in a worse situation than they were a hundred years ago.It continues to lend a terrible element of fragility to our civilization,placing us in a situation where our life would break down com-pletely if anything ever interfered with the oil supply.

George F. Kennan

Kennan does not label the logic of his paragraph, not evenby brief connectives like therefore or and so. But the sentence

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structure keeps the logic clear. Sentence after sentence beginswith subject-verb, which suggests the cause-effect relation-ship: "It [the private automobile] is . . . It pollutes . . . Itcauses . . . It explodes . . . It has . . . " The repetition of thispattern supports and clarifies the logic—an example of howsentence structure contributes to paragraph unity.

Cause and EffectThus far we have seen paragraphs that develop reasons tosupport the topic and those that develop effects. Often, how-ever, cause and effect are more intimately related. Manythings are simultaneously causes and effects, as when the re-sult you expect an action to have is the reason you do it. InKennan's paragraph above the dire consequences of the au-tomobile are why he worries about it. The journalist PeteHamill expresses much the same point in the following para-graph, explaining that what the car has done to our societymakes it "one of our jailers":

In fact, the automobile, which was hailed as a liberator of humanbeings early in this century, has become one of our jailers. The cityair, harbor-cool and fresh at dawn, is a sewer by 10. The 40-hourweek, for which so many good union people died, is now a joke;on an average day, a large number of people now spend three tofour hours simply traveling to those eight-hour-a-day jobs, stalledon roads, idling at bridges or in tunnels. Parking fees are $5 to $10a day. The ruined city streets cost hundreds more for gashed tires,missing hubcaps and rattled engines.

Frequently cause and effect compose a chain. A gives rise toB, B to C, and so on. Thus B would be both the effect of Aand the cause of C. This paragraph about the effect of tele-vision in the 1950s on boxing (what the writer calls "the SweetScience") develops such a series of causes and effects:

The immediate crisis [of boxing] in the United States, forestallingthe one high living standards might bring on, has been caused by

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the popularization of a ridiculous gadget called television. This isutilized in the sale of beer and razor blades. The clients of thetelevision companies, by putting on a free boxing show almostevery night of the week, have knocked out of business the hundredsof small-city and neighborhood boxing clubs where youngsters hada chance to learn their trade and journeymen to mature their skill.Consequently the number of good new prospects diminishes withevery year, and the peddlers' public is already being asked to be-lieve that a boy with perhaps ten or fifteen fights behind him is atopnotch performer. Neither advertising agencies nor brewers, andleast of all the networks, give a hoot if they push the Sweet Scienceback into a period of genre painting. When it is in coma they wil lfind some other way to peddle their peanuts. A.J. Liebling

Liebling treats both reasons and consequences. The initialcause is the use of television to sell products, the ultimateeffect is the deterioration of prizefighting. But linking theseare several conditions, each the effect of a preceding cause andthe cause of a subsequent effect:

Initial cause: The hucksterism of televisioni

Effect: Too many prizefights

Effect: Disappearance of the small fight club4'

Effect: Inadequate training of young boxersI

Final effect: Deterioration of professional boxing

All this is clearly conveyed with only a single transitionaladverb ("consequently"), used to signal the chief result.

For Practice> Analyze the cause-effect pattern in the following paragraph bymaking a rough diagram like that following the passage by A. J.Liebling.

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It has been a cruel decade for the magazine business. Rising pro-duction costs, postal increases and soaring paper prices have madeit much more difficult to turn a profit. Television has proved a toughcompetitor for advertising and audience, and many of the masscirculation giants, among them Life, Look, and The Saturday Eve-ning Post, have floundered or failed in the contest. Nancy Henry

> Compose a single paragraph developing three or four reasonsto support one of the following topics:

The enormous increase in the cost of housingThe contemporary mania for exerciseThe expansion of professional sports in the last twenty-five yearsRacial (or sexual or religious) biasWhy you like solitary activities—for example, hiking, jogging, bi-cycling, sailing—or why you do not

Consider carefully the order of the reasons and be sure they areclearly linked. Feel free to use an illustration, a restatement, a com-parison or contrast, but give the bulk of the paragraph to reasons.

> Now, using the same topic, compose a paragraph discussingthree or four effects.