Cause and effect papers have many benefits. This type of paper uses an organizational pattern and the audience can easily recognize a sequential pattern that reveals the continuous, consecutive, and fluid movement of ideas. With cause and effect, one can distinguish what sparked a series of events that may lead to a culminating event. The cause and effect style is mostly seen in social studies text books since the author is presenting abstract concepts, facts, and generalizations. With this style, a writer can reach an audience by explaining the background of the cause following with thorough information on the events, or the effect, that was the result of the cause. By doing this, the writer is helping the reader comprehend the events and hopefully grasp the meaning behind the paper.
The writer can better analyze a cause and effect paper by using the Question Network. This learning tool helps the readers understand the text structure. The Q Network consists of two stages: guessing the identity of the major events in a textbook and asking scaffolded questions to determine the relationship between the main event and the prior or contribution events. If one does not ask questions to find the answers, then how can a reader hope to truly understand the meaning? Some questions are what is the author saying and what words are being repeated within the passage? With questioning, the writer can better analyze a cause and effect paper if the paper is written in a clean and concise manner.
You said that it was mainly used by social science text books for abstract ideas, but you didn't mention history. You could have showed how history usually focuses on a chain of single causes to a culminating event. While this is part of social science it deals mostly in hard facts than abstract ideas.
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