IELTS Cause and Effect Essays: Why Candidates Answer the Wrong Question

A cause and effect question in IELTS Writing Task 2 is lost at the planning stage, not in the writing. The candidate reads a prompt about a problem, recognises the topic, and writes the essay they have practised: causes, then solutions. The prompt asked for causes and effects. No solution was wanted.

The English can be good and the essay can be well organised. It still loses marks under Task Response, because a part of the task was not addressed and a part that was not asked for was added instead.

The three question types that look alike

These three prompts are about the same topic. They ask for different essays.

The decisive words are short and easy to miss when you are nervous: causes, reasons, why, effects, results, consequences, impact, solutions, what can be done, measures.

Write the two instruction words at the top of your plan before anything else. If the prompt says causes and effects, the word solution must not appear in your essay. A solution paragraph in a cause and effect essay is not a bonus. It is unasked material taking the place of the half of the question you were supposed to answer.

Cause and effect is not the same as problem and solution

The difference is the direction in time.

• A cause comes before the situation. It explains how the situation arose.
• An effect comes after the situation. It is what the situation produces.
• A solution is a proposal about the future. It is an action someone should take.

Candidates mix causes and effects inside one paragraph because in real life they are linked. In the essay they must be separated, because the question separates them. If the prompt has two parts, your essay has two body paragraphs, one for each part.

The plan the prompt writes for you

Take this question.

In many countries, people are eating more processed food than in the past. What are the causes of this trend, and what effects does it have on health?

The prompt has given you your structure. You do not need to invent one.

1. Introduction. Paraphrase the situation in one sentence. In a second sentence, name the cause and the effect you will discuss. Two sentences is enough.
2. Body paragraph one: causes. Two causes, with the stronger one first. Explain each. Do not mention health.
3. Body paragraph two: effects. Two effects on health. Explain each. Do not mention causes again.
4. Conclusion. One sentence restating the main cause and the main effect. No new idea, no recommendation.

Two causes and two effects, explained, is a better answer than four causes listed. Development is what Task Response measures. A list is not development.

A worked answer

Here is the essay, written to that plan, at 268 words.

Introduction. Food that has been processed and packaged now makes up a large share of the diet in many countries, where fresh ingredients were once normal. This change has been driven mainly by cost and by working hours, and its clearest result is a rise in diet related illness.

Causes. The first cause is price. Processed food is manufactured in large quantities and stores for months, so it is often cheaper per meal than fresh vegetables or meat, and a family with a limited budget will choose it for that reason alone. The second cause is time. In cities where both adults in a household work long hours and travel far to reach their jobs, there is little time left to cook, and a packaged meal that is ready in five minutes solves a problem that a bag of raw ingredients does not.

Effects. The main effect on health is weight gain. Processed food is usually high in sugar, salt and fat but low in fibre, so it is easy to eat a large number of calories without feeling full, and over years this produces obesity. A second effect is the illness that follows. Conditions linked to diet, such as type two diabetes and high blood pressure, develop slowly and are expensive to treat, so the cost of this change is paid later, by health services as well as by individuals.

Conclusion. The move towards processed food is therefore explained mostly by its low price and by a shortage of time to cook, and its most serious consequence is an increase in diet related disease.

Three things to notice in that answer.

No solution appears. There is no sentence about what governments should do. The question did not ask.

The causes paragraph does not mention health, and the effects paragraph does not mention price. Each paragraph answers one part of the question only. This is what makes the essay easy to follow, and Coherence and Cohesion is partly about exactly that.

No statistics are invented. The answer says a large share and over years rather than a number. Task 2 is marked on four criteria, which are Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. None of them rewards a figure you cannot source, and a wrong number inside a complex sentence tends to come with a grammar error attached.

Language that keeps causes and effects apart

Use cause language in the cause paragraph and effect language in the effect paragraph. Mixing them is how the two paragraphs start to blur.

One warning about affect and effect, because it appears in almost every essay of this type. Affect is the verb: processed food affects health. Effect is the noun: the main effect is weight gain. If both words are in your essay, check them before you check anything else.

A before and after

Before. There are many causes and effects of this problem, and the government should introduce a tax on sugar to solve it, because people are not aware of the dangers of processed food and education campaigns in schools would help them to understand.

Two faults, one visible and one not. The visible one is the solution, which was not requested. The hidden one is that the sentence promises causes and effects and then delivers neither.

After. The main cause is price, and the main effect is a rise in diet related illness. Lack of public awareness plays a part, but cost decides what most families buy.

The second version answers the question that was asked, and awareness, which was the real idea in the first version, survives as a supporting point rather than as an unrequested recommendation.

What to do today

• Collect six Task 2 questions and write only the two instruction words for each one. Do not write the essays. The skill being practised is reading the prompt.
• Take one of your old essays and label each body paragraph cause, effect, solution or mixed. Anything labelled mixed is a paragraph to split.
• Write one causes paragraph and one effects paragraph on the same topic, and check that neither mentions the other.

The error that costs the most in this question type is invisible in your own answer, because a solution paragraph reads perfectly well on its own. Pasting your essay into Bandly returns an estimated band for each of the four criteria and names the sentences behind the Task Response estimate, which is where an unanswered part of the question shows up. The bands are estimates from a scoring engine rather than marks from an examiner, so use them to locate the paragraph, then compare it against the prompt yourself.