What is the difference between effect and affect!? I always ask people and they never know! Tell meeee! (please)
First of all, I apologize for not answering this sooner--I was on Tumblr on my phone and I didn't want to write it all out on a little screen.
WOO okay so this is going to be a very long answer, but it's really important, especially for history writing, because it changes the meaning of not just the sentence, but the tone of your inferences of possibly even your whole paper.
Affect is primarily used as a verb, while effect is primarily used as a noun. Now let's start off with affect:
Affect, in most cases of usage, means to influence. It causes something to happen or to change. When it is used as a participle to describe a noun like, for example "Sarah, affected by the loud noise, clasped her hands over her ears," the state of the subject, Sarah, is changed, and her actions are influenced by that change.
Now, affect and effect are easily confused with one another because:
Effect is a noun that most frequently means, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, "a change that results when something is done or happens : an event, condition, or state of affairs that is produced by a cause." When it comes to analytical writing, you predominantly use the "cause and effect" method. This is where affect and effect intertwine and become really confusing. Going back to the definition of effect, that is the result, and it is different from what it was. The cause, a loud noise(and here we are using the previous example with "Sarah"), affects Sarah. The result (aka effect!!) is Sarah covering her ears with her hands.
I hope this helped, and if not, you can send me a message off-anon and I'll try to give either a more-detailed explanation or more-simplified explanation (◡‿◡✿)
