How to Write a Cause and Effect Essay in 7 Steps

A cause and effect essay shows the relationship between the cause and the outcomes. Many people learn how to write a cause and effect essay while in high school and sometimes in college where it is taught as an introductory writing. A cause and effect essay is mainly used to explain what causes something to happen. Depending on the structure of your essay, you can have more than one or two causes and more than one or two effects.

There are seven tips for cause and effect essay writing that will help you

Step 1: Develop a Thesis

This is the topic sentence when you are writing the cause and effect essay. Your arguments should revolve around the thesis statement. The theme or the thesis statement should be captivating and should have the potential to catch a reader’s interest. It should give you an excellent platform to build a strong argument upon. This means that you should not choose a topic that you cannot get the right materials to get a thorough discussion going.

Step2: List the Causes and the Effects

This is one of the essential steps on how to write a cause and effect essay. Highlighting all the possible causes and effects gives you focus! It gives a clear mental picture of the solid relationships that exist between the causes and the effects in response to your thesis statement. As a result, you get to prepare an excellent framework that shows how the various causes and effects interlink or fit together to give you a full story!

Step 3:  Prepare an Outline

This is perhaps the most significant step on how to write a cause and effect essay because it gives you the right information about your essay topic. It entails the planning of the material you are going to include in the introduction, body and conclusion of your essay. An impressive outline does not come to you quickly. You must conduct adequate research on your topic, causes and effects that you have already developed so that you get to fill in the essay with relevant content. This is particularly useful if you do not have experience in the topic that your cause and effect essay is addressing. Start your outline by presenting a particular phenomenon or trend that will be the cause of your essay.

Step 4: Brainstorm

After preparing the draft and establishing your cause, you should then decide on the effects that will comprise the body of your essay. A cause may have so many effects that may not be realistic to cover in your essay. It is, therefore, important to brainstorm the most significant effects of your work and leaving out the ones that are less significant for your essay. This is also important because it will help you keep enough content just for your word count. Brainstorming also helps you to present your ideas in a more fresh way by helping you to articulate the relationships between the causes and effects throughout your essay.

Step 5: Compose a Concise Introduction

When you are writing a cause and effect essay, you should write a very attractive introduction in a manner that clearly articulates the relationships between the causes and the effects. The parting shot of the introductory paragraph should also capture the thesis statement. This should help you to state your essay's purpose in a brief manner such that a reader gets the idea of what your essay is about. As earlier mentioned, the thesis statement should explain a precise relationship between cause and effect for your topic of choice. Another important thing is to have different topic sentences in each paragraph throughout the essay. These topic sentences introduce the central idea in each section followed by a clear and captivating elaboration of that main idea.

Step 6: Keep a Logically Smooth Flow

Once you begin writing your essay, each effect should have a logical connection with the stated cause. The flow should resonate with the points, as a series of events that happens one after the other in a logical order. The relationships between the effects and the cause and from one paragraph to the other should flow naturally so that the reader clearly understands the message that you are trying to convey. You should also make a firm focus on the main points in your essay strongly linking the causes and the effects with a smooth flow.

Step 7: Conclusion

This is the last step in writing a cause and effect essay. When you reach this point, you should re-state the thesis statement that you had mentioned in your introductory paragraph. It should be a long paragraph as it delivers your parting shot. Here you concisely show the way your thesis statement supports the cause and effect topic that you are writing about.

When writing a cause and effect essay, you may encounter various challenges. However, following the above tips is very crucial and will always enable you to write a great cause and effect essay on a topic of your choice.