Basic Elements of a Cause and Effect Essay

There are six basic parts to a cause and effect essay.  If you include these in your cause and effect essay, it will be coherent and please the reader’s sense of order and logic.  However, if you deviate from this basic structure, it is likely that your reader will miss the main point of the essay: which is that the event of phenomenon that you are presenting, happened for a specific reason that can be shown.

Any cause and effect essay that you write will begin with an introduction.  It is here that you will state the basic premise of the paper.  As is always the case, this should be written last after you have written the rest of the essay.  Once you have written the whole cause and effect essay, you will have some idea of whether or not to include certain aspects of your results, analysis or conclusion here. As you can see, in some ways a cause and effect essay is not much different than a regular essay.

Next you will then outline a specific event that will be considered to be the “cause” in your cause and effect essay.  It is here that you would talk about why this particular cause is important or should be important. Once you have introduced and important cause, you can introduce what effects are of the cause.  What happened as a result?  What was the consequence? Why does the consequence matter?

With these elements it is important to link your cause and effect to your main thesis.  You have stated the cause and effect and why they are both important; you must now talk about what they mean.  In other words, is the cause something that needs to be repeated to get more of the desired effect, or should less of it be done?