Essay #3: Considering Cause and Effect

Begin by reading:

• “The Struggle for an Education” by Booker T. Washington
• “Booker T. Washington: A Student’s Memory of Him” by William H. Holtzclaw

Your writing task:

The basic question here is very simple:

Why was Booker T. Washington so strict with the students at Tuskegee Institute?

Hints for success:

The assignment asks you to do several things:

First, do more reading about Booker T. Washington. The name may be unfamiliar to you, or you may only know the name but not much about the man. He really was an important historical figure, and you should find out about him.

Second, avoid the temptation to make this an “everything I could find about Booker T. Washington” paper. The assignment asked a very specific question, so when you ramble on about his favorite food or where he was buried, you have only filled space. You have not actually done the assignment.

Third, avoid the temptation to write a pop psychology paper. Do you really know enough about psychology and about the man’s life to label him a victim of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)? Perhaps his strictness was somehow linked to his larger vision about himself or the students he was trying to help. That should really be your focus, not a clinical diagnosis.

Finally, avoid the temptation to let Artificial Intelligence write the paper for you. I can guarantee with about 75% certainty that if you do so, ChatGPT will fabricate quotations and/or Works Cited entries which are totally imaginary. The result will be a paper which loses credit (perhaps receiving a flat zero) for violating the rules of Academic Integrity. Remember that your instructor is required by the university to report all such violations to the Registrar. You don’t want that.

Concerning Cause/Effect Essays:

In general, cause/effect essays such as this one ask for a very careful brand of critical thinking, and there is a lot of territory for error and false conclusions.

• Sequence does not equal cause. “My child swallowed a dime, then caught measles” does not mean that dime-swallowing causes measles. A related error is correlation: “Cities with more churches have higher crime rates. Therefore, churches cause crime.”
• Slippery slope reasoning. “Any girl who would chew gum would smoke cigarettes, and you know what that kind of girl would do!”
• Oversimplifying—confusing necessary with sufficient. You must pass English 101 to get a Bachelor’s degree from Ashland, but you will not get one the second you pass this course.
• Ignoring other possible causes. “The reason all the players on the basketball team are so tall is that basketball stretches the players.” (Could it be that the tall people are more successful at the game, so they are more likely to make the team?)

Concerning MLA Citations:

Four common student errors will lose you points:

1. Nothing in the text. The MLA system (and the APA system as well) is set up for a small alert in the text plus more complete bibliographic material on the last page. If you do not give the in-text material, you have only done half of it.
2. A bare web address is not enough. I found a great article on biography.com, but that is not enough informatiion for a works cited entry. I would need the name of the article, the full web address, date of publication, date I looked at it, and a couple of other things. (Fortunately, if you go to the bottom of the page, Biogrtaphy.com gives all of it to you.)
3. The in-text item doesn’t give the whole bibliography. That is on the Works Cited page.
4. Inventing stuff. Some sources do not have a stated author, and that would drive many students into a panic. They invent author entry items such as “N.A.” or “Anonymous” or “Author not found.” You do not have to fix MLA. A Works Cited page entry without a stated author simply starts with the title of the source page. (By the way, APA works the same way.)

On a happier note:

The whole point of a university is to find information and put it together to answer questions—perhaps questions nobody has asked before (or at least questions that may be new to you). That’s the point of this assignment. You can’t build with mere guesses or fantasy, but when you have some solid beginning points, the result is beautiful.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.
Revised 8/3/26 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.