Claims Neither Note Supports

Notes are a pile of separate facts. Welding two of them together into one sentence is easy, but the weld itself can add meaning the notes never gave you. If a bookshop moves to the high street in 2019 and its monthly sales rise 12 percent that same year, those are two true, separate observations. The moment a sentence says the move caused the rise, or links them with because, it has added a claim the notes don't contain. The notes never ruled out other explanations, so the test isn't whether the claim sounds plausible. It's whether a note actually said it.

Causal words do real work: because, led to, caused, which made, as a result. Each one asserts a mechanism, not just a sequence. 'Sales rose because the shop moved' sounds tidy, but the notes only give a move and a rise in the same year, nothing about why. Same-year timing is the classic trap: two events sharing a year, or happening one after another, feel connected, but correlation isn't causation until a note explicitly says so. A streetlight installation and a drop in collisions in the same year could be linked, or the drop could be weather, enforcement, or traffic volume. Without a note saying so, the safest sentence just states both facts side by side, usually joined by 'and'.

The fix isn't to avoid causal language forever. When a note itself states the cause, like 'researchers attribute the shift in budburst to warmer springs,' a causal sentence is accurate, not an overreach. This connects directly to picking connectors elsewhere on the page: the right linking word always matches what the notes actually assert, whether that's addition, contrast, or genuine cause. Read the notes first, decide what relationship they support, and only then choose words that match it.