Because I want you to have the tools

          The following is an example of a Cause and Effect essay of the type I want you to write for MON FEB 08. The sample is based on Beth Johnson's "The Professor Is a Dropout," an essay with which you are very familiar.

          As I have assigned you to do in your Cause and Effect essay, the author of this sample has written from the point of view of a character in the essay, in this case the principal of Lupe Quintanilla's school in Texas. It has been years since the principal and Lupe's teacher shouted at Lupe in the principal's office and both their lives have changed. As you know, Lupe's changed quite dramatically once she got out of grade school! 

          Also, this sample addresses just one person, Lupe Quintanilla. In the essay, the principal tries to explain why he and the teacher acted as they did. In other words, he explains the causes for the effect.

         Therefore, the essay fulfills the requirements of the assignment: 1) Its form is cause and effect; 2) It is written from the point of view of a character in the essay; 3) It addresses a very specific audience, also a character in the essay.

Why Spanish Frightened Us

          Lupe, I have a confession to make. When you were just a child of 12, and I was already an adult responsible for an entire school of children, you terrified me. You terrifed your teachers too. You terrified us all.

          For our whole lives, we adults had grown up thinking that America was a country of just one color, a country of just one language and religion, a country where we were the only people who mattered. We looked around our Texas towns and everybody looked like us, talked like us, worshipped as we did, married other white people in Christian churches, and raised American families.

          Small and fragile as you were, a Mexican girl in our classroom of American kids was difficult for us to comprehend, let alone accept. You were alien to our understanding, and we were afraid of what we didn't understand. Your differences felt like a threat to our comfortable, perfectly predictable way of life.

          The day your teacher heard you speaking Spanish to a Mexican man in the hallway of our all Anglo school, you might as well have been launching an invasion from a foreign power. It felt like an attack. It shames me now to say so, but we reacted defensively—stupidly, I know—to protect our most precious values.

          I see on the news that you have been named to the White House Commission on Hispanic Education. As your former principal, I should be proud today that one of our students has accomplished so much. Instead, I am humiliated that we treated you so poorly while you were in our care. It's taken me 20 years to learn to value the contributions of immigrants like yourself, Doctor Quintanilla. You see, of the two of us, I'm truly the slow learner.

A note on content

     One more thing about this essay: it doesn't have to tell the whole story. Unlike a literary analysis for an audience that might not know the story well, this essay has only one reader, Lupe Quintanilla, and she knows the story from her personal experience. So, audience determines not only how the essay is written, but also its content.