Cause and Effect Paragraphs in “The History of America” on Microsoft Encarta Premium 2008

ABSTRACT

Writing is a way of communicating between the writer and readers. This aims to make the reader understand what the writer’s idea or main point. To produce effective writing, it is important to know each component that establishes a good writing. One of them is paragraph. There are several processes in the paragraph development. A cause and effect paragraph is one of them. Cause and effect paragraph explains why something happens and then discusses the results. Indeed, cause and effect is one of the mostly-used forms of organization in academic writings.

“The history of America” is one of articles in Microsoft Encarta Premium 2008 which tells about the story of how the United States from the beginning in the 16th century until modern times. In this article, the writers of course employed cause and effect to tell to the reader why each event happened and what the result.

This study is focused on cause and effect paragraphs. There are two main ways to organize cause and effect paragraphs: “chain” organization and “block” organization. The purposes of the study are (1) to describe types of cause and effect paragraph are used in “the History of America on Microsoft Encarta Premium 2008”, (2) How the authors apply these types of cause and effect paragraphs in “the History of America on Microsoft Encarta Premium 2008”.

In conducting this study, the researcher used qualitative method. The data are taken from the paragraphs that are used in the History of America. In obtaining the data the researcher used several steps: (1) read through the texts of the History of America by applying skimming-technique, (2) highlight each item of data contains cause and effect, (3) takes around 24 data. Then, the data were analyzed by identifying and describing the cause and effect relationship. Finally, conclusion can be drawn from the result of the study.

The findings of this study show that the cause and effect paragraphs are used in this article in (1) chain organization (2) block organization, (3) a combination of block and chain organization. The most dominant use is chain organization that stated cause and effect relationship directly.

Finally, this study may give benefit especially on the writing study and the students may find that Microsoft Encarta can be used as one of valuable sources of learning material about the application of writing theories. For the researchers who will do research on the same field, they can develop the analysis by discerning other types of paragraph development like chronological process.