Why do we write cause and effect essays at university? This is actually a really easy question to answer. Most of science is concerned with how and why and when ‘things happen’. If we can understand how plants grow, we can plant more and feed them more effectively. We might also notice that plants grow better in the sunlight, and so we stop trying to grow them in dark places. If we can observe the underlying processes (photosynthesis) we become better farmers and scientists. We document our findings to help other people understand how we got to our conclusion(s), and help them to grow better plants.

With science, we can normally work out why certain transformations occur. It is easy to imagine what is going to happen when we throw gasoline on to a trash fire. We are certainly not going to win any ‘Firefighter of the Year’ awards! The fire will get bigger and more dangerous. Now imagine that the fire is in one room in a university. How did that fire come to be there? Who lit it and why? Was it accidental or intentional? These are all questions that need to be answered, and the answers are all possible to find if we investigate far enough back in time.

Read the following life story:

In this timeline, we can see that a series of bad choices led Budi to set the bin on fire. From a promising start (Budi has two parents and a home, presumably, and can afford tertiary education) we can see that his future was likely to be good. What were the causes that led to the fire? At each level of his story we need to ask ourselves why these things happened.

Why was Budi particularly bad at English at school?

Genetics?

Did he have a terrible teacher?

Was the class size too big or was it too noisy?

Why did the local café allow children to come in when they should have been at school?

Did the café owner need the money from the students buying soft drinks more than they cared about the students missing classes and smoking?

Why did Budi take the cigarette from the older students?

Was it peer pressure?

Had he been exposed to too many commercials for cigarettes?

Was his father or mother a smoker?

Why did he miss the first part of the class?

Was the lecturer not clear enough about their classroom policy for lateness?

Why did the teacher not explain again to Budi how to write a cause and effect essay?

Was it because Budi regularly missed the start of classes and this time he/she had enough of Budi’s tardiness?

Why did the lecturer not go to the toilet before class?

Why did Budi think setting fire to a bin was a good plan?

If you can answer any of these questions, we are closer to finding the reason, or cause of the event (the fire). It is helpful to understand that a cause has an effect. That affect can then become a new cause. Which leads to a new effect and so on…

No event exists purely in a vacuum and everything that leads up to that moment is to some extent part of a chain of events that we call ‘life’. It is up to us as the writer to frame which events are relevant for the reader to know. We might not care about Budi on his own, but if there was a trend of universities across Indonesia burning down, we might want to study the causes of that phenomenon on a bigger scale.

Now let’s look at the same event, but placing it at the start of the ‘causal chain’:

This chain of events created an issue that would concern most Indonesians, and probably make worldwide news. The Grenfell Tower Block fire disaster in London in 2017 raised important issues about the safety of tenants in government-owned housing and many experts have been asked to look into the causes of this disaster. With people’s lives at stake, this cause/effect report would have important implications for government policy.