Cause and effect paragraph used in Business column of The Jakarta Globe Newspaper

ABSTRACT

In writing process, the writers usually apply some types of development paragraph, one of them is cause and effect paragraph. It is a development paragraph that attempts to show how events or some actions happen. Besides, it also shows the cause of a thing happens (causes) and what the result is (effect). One of motives in writing using cause and effect development is to convey information in the form of reports on news or events.

This research investigates the types of cause and effect and the way how to organize it. The purposes of the research are to find types of cause and effect paragraph used by the writers of business column of the Jakarta Globe Newspaper and describe the way to organize it.

The descriptive qualitative method is used to conduct this research. The data of this research is the paragraphs which belong to the type and the organization of cause and effect paragraph. The data source of this research is the articles of business column of the Jakarta Globe New Newspaper published from March 12 to 31, 2010. The instrument of research is the researcher herself as the primary instrument to gather the data.

There are three types of cause and effect paragraph. Those are one cause- multiple effects, one effect-multiple causes, and causal chain. The most dominant type used is one cause-multiple effects that declared something to result many things. In addition, almost all of the cause and effect paragraph in articles begin with immediate cause and effect in each paragraph and proceeding to the remote or from the less important to the most important. In another hand, some of them do not use the common principle of cause and effect proposed by Smalley and Ruetten (1982).

Based on the findings above, this study may give benefit, especially on the writing study and the students may find that the Jakarta Globe Newspaper can be used as one of valuable sources of learning material about the application of writing theories. For the further researchers who will do research on the same field, they can develop the analysis by using other types of paragraph development like comparison and contrast.