Causation: Trigger, Cause, Condition

Three layers, not one list

Weak essays give a list of causes of equal size. Strong essays sort them:

• Conditions — long-running features that made the outcome possible: distance from London, a century of colonial self-government, an educated print culture.
• Causes — developments that pushed events in one direction: war debt after 1763, new taxes, the Proclamation Line.
• Triggers — the specific spark: the Coercive Acts, Lexington and Concord.

The sorting itself is the argument. A trigger cannot explain an outcome on its own, because a spark needs fuel; conditions cannot explain timing, because they were true for decades without producing revolution.

Language that shows causal thinking

• made possible — a condition.
• increased the likelihood that — a contributing cause.
• was the immediate occasion for — a trigger.
• without which the outcome would have been unlikely — a claim about necessity, the strongest and riskiest.

Two mistakes the rubric punishes

Sequence is not cause. That the Great Awakening came before the Revolution does not make it a cause. You owe a mechanism: it trained colonists to hear a speaker challenge established authority and built the first intercolonial networks.

Effects are not causes. The Declaration of Independence did not cause the Revolution; it announced it. Check every item on your list by asking what it came before.

The counterfactual test is the fastest way to rank causes: remove the cause and ask whether the outcome still happens. Remove Britain's war debt and the tax crisis has no engine — that is a strong cause. Remove Paine's pamphlet and independence probably still comes, though later and with less popular support — that is a real but secondary cause.