How to Show Cause and Effect Relationships in your Essay

In this lesson, you will learn how to express cause and effect or cause and result relationships in your essay. You are going to learn how to use subordinating conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, verbs, and phrases.

Now! Let's get started by first looking at an essay topic:

With the increasing popularity of ebooks, will printed books become obsolete?

If you analyze this essay topic, you will find there is a cause and result relationship.

OKay! So the cause is the increasing popularity of Ebooks, while the result is that printed books will become obsolete. So how can we link the cause and result together?

The easiest way is to use because, because of, or since to introduce the cause. Because and since are subordinating conjunctions whereas because of is a preposition.

Here are a few examples

In addition to 'because of', there are other prepositions that can introduce the cause.

Take a look at the following list of prepositions.

All the preposition in this list basically mean the same as 'because of'. However, “because of” is less formal than the others, so your essay will benefit from using these prepositions over “because of”

Let's look at an example sentence.

Because of the increasing popularity of ebooks, there has been a fall in paper book sales.

Now let's paraphrase it to use the more formal prepositions:

You can also put a preposition in the middle of the sentence like the following examples

If you don't want to use these prepositions, you can also use the word “result” followed by the preposition “from” to introduce the cause. Or you can simply use the verb 'cause'.

Let's look at a few examples of “result from” and “cause”.

In all three examples, the cause is “the increasing popularity of ebooks.” while the result is “The decline in paper book sales”.

Another word you can use to introduce the cause of something is "arise". It is followed by the preposition "from".

Take a look at the following examples

OK! let's look at our final word "attribute". A is attributed to B means A is the result of B and B is the cause of A.

The examples below demonstrate how to use attribute:

So far we've talked about how to introduce the cause using phrases like “result from” and “arise from”, prepositions like “because of”, “owing to”, “due to”, “as a result of”, and “as a consequence of”, and subordinating conjunctions like “because” and “since”.

Alright! It may be a good idea to take a 5 minute break and then review what you have learned, because, In the next section, we are going to talk about how to express the cause and relationship by introducing the result/effect.

The most common way to introduce the result is to use conjunctive adverbs such as “consequently, therefore, as a consequence, and as a result”.

Using the previous example, we can paraphrase it to the following:

As you can see, the sentence after the conjunctive adverb is the result. The sentence before the conjunctive adverbs is the cause.

The prepositional phrases to introduce the results or effects are as shown in the following list

In this list, “result in”, “lead to”, and “contribute to” have a similar meaning and are often used interchangeably. However, there is a subtle difference between when and how we use them.

Now take a look at the following sentences.

So! The second sentence would probably make more sense than the first sentence since the process of the drop in paper book sales is not instant. The third sentence implies that there are other factors that caused the drop in paper book sales.

Now let's look at more examples using result in, lead to, contribute to, and give rise to.