Unit 3 · Topic 3.6

3.6 Methods of development: narration and cause-effect

Methods of development are familiar patterns, such as telling a story or tracing causes, that give an argument its shape. Narration uses a real experience, with reflection on what it means, to make a point. Cause-effect explains why something happens or what follows from it. Both can be powerful support in your own essays.

Key terms

method of development
narration
anecdote
cause and effect

Methods of development

A method of development is a familiar pattern for building an argument. It helps readers follow the reasoning because they recognize the pattern. The five you'll study are narration, cause-effect, comparison-contrast, definition and description. This topic covers the first two; Unit 4 covers the rest. Writers often mix several in one text.

Narration: story plus meaning

Narration tells about a real experience in detail, then reflects on why it matters. The reflection is the part that turns a story into an argument. Without it, a story is just entertainment; with it, the story becomes evidence for a claim.

Good argumentative narration is selective. It includes the details that support the point and skips the rest. It often moves from what happened to what the writer realized, and from one person's experience to a larger truth.

When you read a narrative passage on the exam, separate the two layers. Ask what happens, then ask what the writer wants you to conclude from it. Questions about narration almost always target the second layer.

Cause-effect

Cause-effect reasoning explains why something happens or what results from it.

In reading passages, writers often argue about causes because blame and solutions follow from them. When Jacob Riis describes a child dying of measles in a New York tenement, he states the cause bluntly: "That dark bedroom killed it." By blaming the room rather than the illness or the parents, he points readers toward his solution, better housing. Cause-effect reasoning usually takes one of the shapes below.

One cause, several effects: a new highway brings traffic, noise and new businesses.
Several causes, one effect: low sleep, early start times and long commutes add up to tired students.
A chain: each effect becomes the cause of the next.
Signal words: because, so, therefore, as a result, led to, consequently.

Using them in your essays

In the argument essay, a short personal anecdote can be strong evidence if it's specific and you explain what it shows. Keep it brief, a few sentences, and spend more words on the meaning than on the plot. Cause-effect is useful whenever you argue that a policy will help or harm: show each link in the chain, and watch for the false-cause flaw from topic 3.5.

Worked examples

Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.

Example 1
Narration and cause-effect in Douglass
In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Douglass recalls that as an enslaved child in Baltimore, his mistress, Sophia Auld, began teaching him the alphabet until her husband stopped her, saying that learning would make Douglass unfit to be a slave. Douglass then reflects: "From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom." Explain how narration and cause-effect work together in this passage.
Show the solutionHide the solution
1. Step 1: Narration: a specific memory with real people, a place and a turning point, the lessons that are suddenly stopped.
2. Step 2: Cause-effect: Mr. Auld's warning reveals a cause-and-effect link. If reading would make a person unfit for slavery, then keeping people unable to read helps keep them enslaved.
3. Step 3: Reflection: "From that moment, I understood" shows the story's meaning. Douglass treats the master's words as an accidental lesson.
4. Step 4: Connect to the larger argument: the scene supports the book's claim that slavery depended on keeping enslaved people ignorant, and that education leads toward freedom.
Answer: Model paragraph: Douglass turns a childhood memory into an argument about how slavery worked. The narration is brief and specific: his lessons begin, and then his master stops them, warning that learning would make him unfit to be a slave. Douglass then draws out the cause and effect hidden in that warning. If literacy unfits a person for slavery, then slavery depends on ignorance, and learning is a way out. His reflection, "From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom," marks the story's turning point: the master's attempt to protect slavery accidentally teaches Douglass how to escape it.
Example 2
Making a personal anecdote count
Practice draft (written for this page), responding to "Does competition bring out the best in people?": "Last year I ran cross-country. We had a lot of meets and I ran a lot. It was fun." Revise it so the anecdote supports a claim.
Show the solutionHide the solution
1. Step 1: Choose a claim: competition helps most when it's measured against your own past results, not just against others.
2. Step 2: Keep only the details that support it, and make them specific.
3. Step 3: Add reflection that explains what the experience shows, and connect it to the larger claim.
Answer: Revised: Competition helps most when it's measured against your own record. In my first cross-country season, I finished near the back of every race, and comparing myself to the leaders made me want to quit. Then my coach started tracking each runner's personal best, and by October I had cut almost two minutes from my time. I was still far from first place, but I trained harder than ever, because the race I could win was against my own last result. Competition pushed me only once it measured something I could control.

Common mistakes

Telling a story with no reflection, so the reader can't see how it supports the claim.
Letting an anecdote take up most of a paragraph, leaving little room for commentary.
Claiming one event caused another without showing the connection, which is the false-cause flaw from 3.5.

On the exam

Reading questions may ask what an anecdote or a narrative section "primarily serves to" do. Look at the reflection that follows the story.
In Question 3, personal experience counts as evidence, as long as it's specific and you explain how it supports your argument.

Connected topics

Videos

How to Write about Personal Experience in an Argument Essay | AP Lang Q3 | Coach Hall Writes
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Stanly Community College English DepartmentWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
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Rhetorical Mode Series: Cause and Effect
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Check yourself

5 questions on 3.6 Methods of development: narration and cause-effect. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.

If I understand the idea, the Bazar invites several of us to write upon the above text. It means the change in my life’s course which introduced what must be regarded by me as the most important condition of my career. But it also implies—without intention, perhaps—that that turning-point itself was the creator of the new condition. This gives it too much distinction, too much prominence, too much credit. It is only the last link in a very long chain of turning-points commissioned to produce the cardinal result; it is not any more important than the humblest of its ten thousand predecessors. Each of the ten thousand did its appointed share, on its appointed date, in forwarding the scheme, and they were all necessary; to have left out any one of them would have defeated the scheme and brought about some other result. I know we have a fashion of saying “such and such an event was the turning-point in my life,” but we shouldn’t say it. We should merely grant that its place as LAST link in the chain makes it the most conspicuous link; in real importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.

When I was twelve and a half years old, my father died. It was in the spring. The summer came, and brought with it an epidemic of measles. For a time a child died almost every day. The village was paralyzed with fright, distress, despair. Children that were not smitten with the disease were imprisoned in their homes to save them from the infection. In the homes there were no cheerful faces, there was no music, there was no singing but of solemn hymns, no voice but of prayer, no romping was allowed, no noise, no laughter, the family moved spectrally about on tiptoe, in a ghostly hush. I was a prisoner. My soul was steeped in this awful dreariness—and in fear. At some time or other every day and every night a sudden shiver shook me to the marrow, and I said to myself, “There, I’ve got it! and I shall die.” Life on these miserable terms was not worth living, and at last I made up my mind to get the disease and have it over, one way or the other. I escaped from the house and went to the house of a neighbor where a playmate of mine was very ill with the malady. When the chance offered I crept into his room and got into bed with him. I was discovered by his mother and sent back into captivity. But I had the disease; they could not take that from me. I came near to dying. The whole village was interested, and anxious, and sent for news of me every day; and not only once a day, but several times. Everybody believed I would die; but on the fourteenth day a change came for the worse and they were disappointed.

This was a turning-point of my life. (Link number one.) For when I got well my mother closed my school career and apprenticed me to a printer. She was tired of trying to keep me out of mischief, and the adventure of the measles decided her to put me into more masterful hands than hers.

A young printer wanders around a good deal, seeking and finding work; and seeking again, when necessity commands. N. B. Necessity is a CIRCUMSTANCE; Circumstance is man’s master—and when Circumstance commands, he must obey; he may argue the matter—that is his privilege, just as it is the honorable privilege of a falling body to argue with the attraction of gravitation—but it won’t do any good, he must OBEY.

Mark Twain, "The Turning-Point of My Life," Harper's Bazar (February 1910). The magazine had invited several well-known writers to describe the turning point of their lives. In the omitted section between paragraphs 1 and 2, Twain discusses Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon as a famous "turning-point." A short paragraph is also omitted between paragraphs 3 and 4.

Question 1 of 5

The story of the measles in paragraph 2 serves mainly as

Question 2 of 5

Which of the following best describes the sequence of causes and effects in paragraphs 2 and 3?

My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another. In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband’s precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.

From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.

The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of errands, I always took my book with me, and by going one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. I am strongly tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids;—not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country. It is enough to say of the dear little fellows, that they lived on Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey’s ship-yard.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Chapter VII. As a boy, Douglass was sent to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld. Sophia Auld ("my mistress") began teaching him the alphabet until her husband forbade it.

Question 3 of 5

In paragraph 1, Douglass explains the change in his mistress mainly through

Question 4 of 5

The contrast between the "lamblike disposition" and "tiger-like fierceness" (paragraph 1) primarily serves to

Question 5 of 5

Paragraph 3 is developed mainly through

0 of 5 answered