Cause and Effect.

I cannot comment with any authority on how the rest of the world behaves, but Americans and obsessed by CAUSE. As soon as we find ourselves in a position of some urgency, our first priority (often to our detriment) is to account for how we got there. This obsession with cause makes it quite likely that if the speaker clearly indicates that he or she is going to employ a cause and effect organizational pattern, the audience member will be both willing and able to follow.
How about one of those maddeningly scholarly definitions?

To organize employing cause and effect is to connect a precedent to its consequence--that is a result to the actions from which it inevitably follows.

Dictionary!

Let's try to say that in simpler terms. From the point of view of rhetorical cause and effect, the universe is a pool table on which things get where they are, because other things bump into them.

The speaker's goal can be broken into the following steps:

1. cleary define an action or set of actions.
2. clearly define a circumstance or situation.
3. give sufficient evidence to
   • help the audience member understand, and
   • persuade the audience member to believe that

   the latter issued directly from the former.

One of the unique properties of Cause and Effect is that the speaker can go either direction to establish the relationship. The speaker can, first, establish the situation with which the audience must contend, then go backwards to the actions leading up to it; or the speaker can begin by describing actions--either performed or proposed--and show how the have or will lead to a particular result. Audience's are comfortable with either option, as long as the cause and effect are clearly "labelled."

When employing Cause and Effect Development, keep these things in mind:

1. Beware of "Faulty Causal Reasoning." Another way to say this is to confuse precedent with cause. Do not assume that because an action preceded a consequence, the consequence followed from the action. The best example of this all-too-common error is superstition. If a speaker asserts that dire circumstances proceed from the lighting of too many cigarettes from a single match, from having walked under a ladder or across the path of a black cat, the audience will most likely demand an accounting of how one can be related to the other.
2. Be careful not to oversimplify.Let's face it, the universe is not a pool table. For that matter, not even a pool table is a pool table in the sense that one force knocking against another is sufficient explanation for why the other acts the way it does. Every consequence results from a complex set of causes and conditions. To ignore that complexity or to provide too mechanical an explanation of why something is the way it is, leads to weak and ineffective argument.

   Consider the tragic but illuminating case of someone who claims that a loved one radically altered his/her personality or even committed suicide, because he or she listened to a particular song or genre of music--that the music somehow CAUSED the tragedy. Those of us who face such tragedies wish (and cannot really be held in too much disdain for believing) that such simple explanations exist, but the rest of us cannot be so casual in our investigation of cause and effect.

   I am going to go out on a limb here and state a few declarations:

   • People neither commit suicide nor shoot policemen, because a particular song tells them too.
   • People do not go on killing sprees, because they eat junk food.
   • Ouija Boards do not call forth the devil.

   To claim that they do one had better have massive amounts of evidence to support the cause and effect relationship.

3. Related to oversimplification is confusion of condition with cause. As stated previously, a cause is some directly precedent action that leads to the result. The result follows directly from the action. A Condition is a state or context in which a possible outcome has a greater likelihood of occuring.

   For instance, which house below is more likely to be burglarized?

   

   If you picked Home A, give up your life of crime and return to your first love,Macrame. If you picked Home B, you are right. Home B is more likely to be burglarized, because the street light illuminates the entrance to Home A, but the street light that should illuminate Home B is broken. The burglar would obviously prefer Home B.

   That said, recognize that the broken street light in no way CAUSES Home B to be burglarized. The condition of darkness created by the broken street light simply increases the likelihood that if someone decides to burglarize a home, it will be Home B.

   Influence is not the same as cause. You can argue effectively on the basis of influence, just do not make the mistake (or the intentional manipulation) of confusing the two.

Sample Outline for Cause and Effect Development.

Discussion of Outline.

Return to Clarity.