When your purpose is to explain why something happened or may happen, you are writing about causes and effects (results, consequences). On the surface, cause-and-effect relationships may seem simple: This happened because of that. In fact, however, causal relationships are rarely simple. Usually there are multiple causes for an effect, and several consequences may spring from a single cause. Moreover, causes and effects tend to occur in chain reactions, like dominoes falling: A cause creates effects, which then become causes of still other effects, and so on. Consider the causal relationships in the following short paragraph.
The suburb could not have developed without the family automobile. In turn, the growth of suburbia made the automobile king, a necessity of life and in some ways a tyrant. Each family needed a car because suburbanites worked at some distance from their homes and public transportation to many of the new com munities did not exist. Because it was necessary for a suburban housewife and mother to cover considerable distances each day, the two-car family became a common phenomenon: one suburban family in five owned two vehicles. — Joseph Conlin, The American Past
Writing about cause - and-effect relationships requires special care for logic .
