Change, cause & effect

We've seen how connectors can make cause and effect relationships clear, either by making the relationship explicit (they did this so we did that) or by helping us infer the relationship (since that happened I've been like this).

But we've also seen that we can show cause and effect without using connectors at all, so long as the context is clear enough that the reader can infer the relationship.

For example, consider this pair of events:

Are these events related?

Who knows! It doesn't sound like they are.

But if we said:

Now we assume the two things are related, and that Delian has long had an opinion about this relationship and he's happy to see it ended.

(Why? Because he thought it was unhealthy? Because he wants to go out with Akilah or Oswald? So many questions!)

That example was a bit easy

That example is easy because Delian is having an emotional reaction which we assume is in response to the preceding event.

What if we keep talking in terms of soup?

A minor tweak to the original, but adding 'her' makes us assume the two events are related: maybe Delian is trying to cheer Akilah up.

In this next part of the lesson, we're going to play around with this type of inferred cause and effect.