Causal Essay Topics

A causal essay is much like a cause and effect essay, but there is a subtle difference in the minds of some instructors.

The causal essay might address more complex topics, while the cause and effect essay may address smaller or more straightforward topics. Your goal in a causal essay assignment is simple: you must come up with a list of events or factors (causes) that bring about a certain outcome (effect).

You must make a clear connection between each cause and the ultimate effect.

The most common problem students face in writing the causal essay is running out of "causes" to talk about! Be certain to sketch out an outline before you begin writing the first draft of your outline.

Your essay should include a strong introduction, good transition statements, and a well-crafted conclusion.

You can use a topic from this list, or use the list as inspiration for your own idea.

• What conditions and events led to the Great Depression?
• What prompts a change in fashion trends?
• Why do some people fear darkness?
• How did some dinosaurs leave footprints?
• What causes criminal behavior?
• What causes people to rebel against authority?
• What conditions lead to a powerful hurricane?
• What developments led to regional accents in the United States?
• Why do good students become truant?
• What causes war?
• What factors can lead to birth defects?
• How are insurance rates determined?
• What factors can lead to obesity?
• What can cause evolution to occur?
• Why does unemployment rise?
• Why do some people develop multiple personalities?
• How does the structure of the earth change?
• What factors can cause bulimia nervosa?
• What makes a marriage fail?
• What developments and conditions led to the Declaration of Independence?
• What led to the decline of the automobile industry?
• What factors led to the decline of the Roman Empire?
• How did the Grand Canyon form?
• Why did slavery replace indentured servitude in the American colonies?
• How has popular music been affected by technology?
• How has racial tolerance changed over time?
• What led to the Dot Com bubble burst?
• What causes the stock market to fall?
• How does scarring occur?
• How does soap work?
• What causes a surge in nationalism?
• Why do some bridges collapse?
• Why was Abraham Lincoln assassinated?
• How did we get the various versions of the Bible?
• What factors led to unionization?
• How does a tsunami form?
• What events and factors led to women's suffrage?
• Why did electric cars fail initially?
• How do animals become extinct?
• Why are some tornadoes more destructive than others?
• What factors led to the end of feudalism?
• What led to the "Martian Panic" in the 1930s?
• How did medicine change in the nineteenth century?
• How does gene therapy work?
• What factors can lead to famine?
• What factors led to the rise of democratic governments in the 18th century?
• How did baseball become a national pastime in the United States?
• What was the impact of Jim Crow laws on black citizens in the United States?
• What factors led to the growth of imperialism?
• Why did the Salem Witch Trials take place?
• How did Adolf Hitler come to power?
• What can cause damage to your credit?
• How did the conservationism start?
• How did World War I start?
• How do germs spread and cause illness?
• How do we lose weight?
• How does road salt prevent accidents?
• What makes some tires grip better than others?
• What makes a computer run slowly?
• How does a car work?
• How has the news industry changed over time?
• What created Beatlemania?
• How did organized crime develop?
• What caused the obesity epidemic?
• How did grammar rules develop in the English language?
• Where do political parties come from?
• How did the Civil Rights movement begin?

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SAT Essay Tip

The following quote comes from the instruction page for the SAT essay section at the College Board web site:

"You are asked to develop your point of view on the issue, not give a straight report of the facts. This is your opinion, so feel free to use "I," and give examples that are meaningful to you, even ones from your personal life or experiences."

So just image you are sitting at a desk taking the actual test, and you're asked to come up with a meaningful even in your life. Could you?

Prepare Ahead: Take an Inventory of Important Events

Meaningful life events are things you normally think about in your quiet time, when you're lying on your bed listening to your favorite music. For most people, they're tough to drum up under the glaring lights and high stress of a test environment.

So what can you do? Before you go to the test, come up with a bank of experiences to draw from.

A personal experience bank is a list of meaningful experiences in your life that you can reflect upon to find a lesson or a meaning. If you think about it, you can probably come up with a list of several events that were pivotal in your life.

These pivotal events may not be happy times, but they are times that brought about change. For instance, can you think of a lesson or new outlook you gained from any of the following situations?

• Your first kiss
• A trip to a foreign country
• A really dumb mistake that became dangerous
• Standing up for yourself when it wasn't popular
• Failing to do the right thing, then being ashamed
• The passing of a pet, friend, or a relative

30 Minutes to Future Success

Find a quiet time to sit and reflect. Make a list of your own experiences, and write a brief paragraph about each event. Is there a moral or lesson to each one?

This exercise will help you realize that we truly do learn from everyday events, as well as painful ones. But it will also give you a rich bank of information to draw from on test day, and for the rest of your life.

Feel Silly?

At first, it might seem a little shallow and ironic to keep a list of deep-meaning experiences on hand to use as a tool for a good score on the test. Don't worry about that.

The essay portion of the SAT is designed to determine whether a student can develop and express meaningful essays. Not mechanical essays. You will be expected to use examples from your studies and your experiences. This exercise merely encourages students to prepare ahead of time.

Read more advice about the SAT writing section.

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Cause and Effect Essay

A cause and effect essay assignment can be challenging. Your job as a writer is to show the relationships between events (how one causes another), but relationships between events are not always straightforward! They can be subtle and/or complex. You will need to demonstrate a number of logical and factual relationships in this type of essay, so you will need to set off with a scientific approach.

Alas, sometimes we have to go with logic when we choose a topic, instead of following our hearts!

You can start off by making a chart to compare several topic ideas. Brainstorm to come up with a causal chain for each possible topic. Try this with a few possible topics to see which one demonstrates a the most straightforward chain of events.

When choosing an essay topic, you may have to compromise a bit. We can't always write about topics that intrigue us. Sometimes we have to choose topics that are easiest to articulate.

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Essay Organization

To improve your ability to understand a difficult book or passage, you can start by finding the organization pattern. This may sound more difficult than it really is. There are a few ways that writers can choose to organize their work, and the organization depends very much on the topic.

If you were writing a description of your bedroom, for example, you would most likely use a spatial organization pattern. You would start by describing one "space" and move on to another space.

If you were required to describe the events that led up to a certain event in history, you most likely organization pattern would be chronological. Chronological just refers to the order things happen in time.

So, one of the first things you should do when trying to understand a difficult text is to figure out the organization pattern. This helps you frame the entire work in your brain or on paper, in an outline.

Chronological Organization is used by writers when they want to describe what happened or happens in a particular order.

• History chapters
• Biographies
• Summer vacation essays

Logical Organization may be used in many ways.

• Argument essays
• Comparison essays

Functional Organization system is used to explain how or why things work.

• How-To essays
• Step-by-Step essays

Spatial Organization is used in essays that describe or give direction concerning a physical location.

• Directions
• Descriptions
• Layouts
• Anatomy essay

Once you determine the overall organization of a text, you'll be able to process information as you read.

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Process Essay

How-to essays, also known as process essays, are like recipes; they provide instruction for carrying out a procedure or task. You can write a how-to essay about any procedure that you find interesting-as long as your topic fits the teacher's assignment.

The first step of writing your how-to essay is brainstorming.

1. Draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper to make two columns. Label one column "materials" and the other column "steps."
2. Next, begin to empty your brain. Write down every item and every step you can think of that will be needed to carry out your task. Don't worry about trying to keep things in order yet. Just empty your head.
3. Once you've noted every fact you can think of, start to number your steps on your brainstorming page. Just jot a number beside each item/step. You may need to erase and scribble a few times to get the order right. It's not a neat process.
4. Your next job is to write an outline. Your essay could contain a numbered list (like you are reading now) or it could be written as a standard narrative essay. If you are instructed to write a step-by-step without using numbers, your essay should contain all the elements of any other essay assignment: an introductory paragraph, a body, and a conclusion. The difference is that your introduction will explain why your topic is important or relevant. For example, your paper about "How to Wash a Dog" would explain that dog hygiene is important for your pet's good health.
5. Your first body paragraph should contain a list of necessary materials. For example: "The equipment you will need depends somewhat on the size of your dog. At the very minimum, you will need dog shampoo, a large towel, and a container large enough to hold your dog. And, of course, you will need a dog."
6. The next paragraphs should contain instructions for following steps in your process, as enumerated in your outline.
7. Your summary explains how your task or process should turn out if it is done correctly. It may also be appropriate to re-state the importance of your topic.

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50 Black History Essay Topics

Black history, or African-American history, is full of fascinating stories, rich culture, great art, and courageous acts that were undertaken within circumstances that we can hardly imagine in modern society. While Civil Rights events are the most common themes in our studies, we should resist equating African-American history only with Civil Rights-era history. There is so much more to explore! This list contains 50 prompts that might lead you into some interesting and little-known information about African-American history.

Note: Your first challenge in studying some of the topics below is finding resources. When conducting an Internet search, be sure to place quotation marks around your search term (try different variations) to narrow your results.

1. African-American newspapers
2. African-American soldiers in the American Revolution
3. African-American soldiers in the Civil War
4. Aviators
5. Buffalo Soldiers
6. Business-owning slaves
7. Buying time
8. Camp Logan Riots
9. Clennon Washington King, Jr.
10. Coffey School of Aeronautics
11. Crispus Attucks
12. Domestic labor strikes in the South
13. Finding lost family members after emancipation
14. First African Baptist Church
15. Fort Mose
16. Freedom's Journal
17. Gospel music
18. Gullah heritage
19. Harlem Hellfighters
20. Harlem Renaissance
21. Harriet Tubman
22. Historically Black Colleges
23. History of rock-and-roll
24. Inventors
25. John Brown
26. Jumping the broom
27. Manumission papers
28. Maroon villages in the eighteenth century
29. Midwifery
30. Motown Records
31. Multi-cultural pirate ships
32. Nat Turner
33. Otelia Cromwell
34. Property-owning slaves
35. Purchasing freedom
36. Ralph Waldo Tyler
37. Register of Free Persons of Color
38. Secret schools in antebellum America
39. Sherman's March followers
40. Slave Narratives
41. Susie King Taylor
42. The Amistad
43. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
44. The Communist Party (involvement)
45. The Great Migration
46. The Haitian Revolution
47. Tuskegee Airmen
48. Underground Railroad
49. Urban slavery (related to buying time)
50. Wilberforce College, Ohio

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SAT Essay Tips

1. Follow the rules.
Don’t score a zero for failing to follow instructions. Use the essay paper that is provided. Do not write in your booklet. Do not change the question. Do not use a pen.

2. Divide your time.
You will have twenty-five minutes to write your essay. As soon as you begin, make a note of the time and give yourself benchmarks and limits. For example, give yourself five minutes to brainstorm for main points (which will become topic sentences), one minute to come up with a great introduction, two minutes to organize your examples into paragraphs, etc.

3. Take a stance.
You will be writing about an issue. Readers judge essays on the depth and complexity of the argument you make (and you will be taking a side), so be sure to show that you understand both sides of the issue you’re writing about. However, you can’t be wishy washy!

You will pick one side and explain why it is right. Demonstrate that you understand both sides, but pick one and explain why it is correct.

4. Don’t get hung up if you don’t actually have strong feelings one way or the other on a subject.
You don’t have to feel guilty about saying things you don’t really believe. Your task is to show that you can craft a complex argument essay. That means you will have to make specific statements about your position and expound upon your individual points. Just take a side and argue it!

5. Don’t try to change the subject.
It may be tempting to change the question to something that is more to your liking. Don’t do that! Readers are instructed to assign a zero score to an essay that doesn’t answer the question provided. If you try to change your question, even slightly, you are taking a risk that the reader will not like your answer.

6. Work with an outline!
Use the first few minutes to brainstorm as many thoughts as possible; organize those thoughts into a logical pattern or outline; then write as quickly and neatly as you can.

7. Talk to your reader.
Remember that the person scoring your essay is a person and not a machine. As a matter of fact, the reader is a trained educator—and most likely a high school teacher. As you write your essay, imagine that you are talking to your favorite high school teacher.

We all have one special teacher who always talks with us and treats us like adults and actually listens to what we have to say. Imagine that you are talking to this teacher as you write your essay.

8. Start with a fabulous or surprising introductory sentence to make a great first impression.
Examples:
Issue: Should cell phones be banned from school property?
First sentence: Ring, ring!
Note: You would follow up on this with well-crafted, fact-filled statements. Don’t try too much cute stuff!
Issue: Should the school day be extended?
First sentence: No matter where you live, the longest period of any school day is the last one.

9. Vary your sentences to show that you have a command of sentence structure.
Use complex sentences sometimes, mid-sized sentences sometimes, and two-word sentences a few times to make your writing more interesting. Also--don’t keep repeating the same point by rewording it several ways. Readers will see right through that.

10. Write neatly.
Neatness counts to some degree, in that the reader must be able to read what you’ve written. If your writing is notoriously difficult to read, you should print your essay. Don’t get too hung up on neatness, though. You can still cross out mistakes that you catch as you proofread your work.

The essay represents a first draft. Readers will like to see that you did, in fact, proof your work and that you recognized your mistakes.

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Argument Essay Topics

Looking for a topic you can really sink your teeth into? The best topic is one that you truly care about, and one that you're prepared to research. You'll have to back up your claim (whichever side you choose) with lots of evidence and support.

These topics are sure to spark some interest.

Note:If these topics are a little too controversial, try Persuasive Essay Topics.

1. Is global climate change man-made? (Find Sources)

2. Is the death penalty effective? (Find Sources)

3. Is our election process fair?

4. Do colleges put too much stock in standardized test scores? (Find Sources)

5. Is torture ever acceptable?

6. Should men get paternity leave from work?

7. Is a lottery a good idea?

8. Do we have a fair taxation system?

9. Do curfews keep teens out of trouble?

10. Is cheating out of control?

11. Are we too dependent on computers?

12. Are parents clueless about child predators on the Internet?

13. Should animals be used for research?

14. Should cigarette smoking be banned?

15. Are cell phones dangerous?

16. Are law enforcement cameras an invasion of privacy?

17. Are test scores a good indication of a school's competency?

18. Do we have a throw-away society?

19. Is child behavior better or worse than it was years ago?

20. Should companies market to children?

21. Should the government have a say in our diets?

22. Does access to condoms prevent teen pregnancy?

23. Does access to condoms lead to irresponsible, dangerous, or bad behavior?

24. Are actors and professional athletes paid too much?

25. Are CEOs paid too much?

26. Do violent video games cause behavior problems?

27. Should creationism be taught in public schools?

28. Are beauty pageants exploitive?

29. Should English be the official language in the United States?

30. Should the racing industry be forced to use biofuels?

31. When should parents let teens make their own decisions?

33. Should the military be allowed to recruit at high schools?

34. Should the alcoholic drinking age be increased or decreased?

35. Does age matter in relationships?

36. What age is appropriate for dating?

37. Should gay couples be able to marry?

38. Are there benefits to attending a single-sex school?

39. Does boredom lead to trouble?

40. Does participation in sports keep teens out of trouble?

41. Is competition good?

42. Does religion cause war?

43. Should the government provide health care?

44. Should girls ask boys out?

45. Is fashion important?

46. Are girls too mean to each other?

47. Is homework harmful or helpful?

48. Should students be allowed to grade their teachers?

49. Is the cost of college too high?

50. Is college admission too competitive?

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