Cause & Effect With a Narrative Essay

Cause-and-effect essays may be written in the narrative format.

Essays are a major part of composition courses in both high school and college. Different formats exist, but two types, the narrative essay and the cause-and-effect essay, may be combined for another format for essay writing. The narrative essay tells a story, while the cause-and-effect essay explains how an event occurred and what the results were.

Identification

To write a cause-and-effect essay, you must first choose to write about a specific event for which you can clearly identify outcomes that resulted from the initial event. To succeed in writing this type of essay, it's important to focus closely and avoid too large a scope for a topic. For instance, World War II is much too large a topic. However, World War II allies would be a more appropriate essay topic. The effect side of the cause topic could be foreign policy decisions that came about due to World War II allies.

The Narrative Essay

A narrative essay tells a story in a conversational style. Narrative essays typcically use the pronoun "I" and are about personal experiences of the writer. Topics may be about important, pivotal life events or about a regular day-to-day type of event or occurrence. The narrative essay must tell the story yet must not be merely a reporting of a life event: It needs to tell the story with a purpose. Consider the idea of Aesop's fables and how a narrative story was shaped in how it was told to illuminate a truth.

Combining Essay Types

To write a narrative essay that's about cause and effect, consider writing about a personal experience that clearly had direct consequences, either as negative ones or as benefits. For instance, a student could write about the lessons of her first job and how it taught her to appreciate the value of money, and how this thereby improved her relationship with her parents as she now understand how spoiled she was prior to earning her own spending money.

Formatting

Plan your paper by creating a simple outline and consider either a straight chronological approach to the narrative or perhaps the more advanced technique of flashbacks integrated into the narrative. The closing of the essay needs to clarify how the events caused later events or conclusions.

References

• Gallaudet University: Different Kinds of Essays
• Roane State: Writing Cause and Effect Essays