These words pertain to the accomplishing of results. Effect can refer to the successful accomplishment of an intended action: The pilot effected a take-off despite the bomb-pocked runway. As in this example, the point of this use is often the overcoming of difficulty or a previous uncertainty as to outcome. The word can also indicate putting into practice a previously formulated goal: We effected the plan with a minimum of fuss. No sense of difficulty or uncertainty need be implied here. When effect applies, however, to the formulating of a plan, goal or solution, rather than to putting one into action, the word takes on a different set of overtones: a board of mediators to effect a compromise in the newspaper strike. While initial resistance is implied, the goal reached is not necessarily known at the outset, but is arrived at through experiments, innovation and improvisation. Also, the word sometimes suggests a rough-and-ready or expedient result, if not a jerry-built one: ready to effect a solution to the problem by any means available.

By contrast, the desired objective implied by realize is always seen in advance, at least in the sense pertinent here: to realize a long-standing dream. The stress of the word in fact, is on making actual or real something that has previously existed only as a plan or desire. Produce can also emphasize visible or actual results, but can apply to intentional or unintentional as well as to both good or bad results: a plan that produced concrete improvements in its first year of operation; proposals that produced fiery outbursts on the floor of the House. At its most literal, the word can apply to the bearing of fruit or the creation of something: countries that produced bumper crops while the famine raged; factories that produce war materials. At its most neutral, the word merely assigns actions or results to the factors or agents that brought them about: Penicillin can produce an extreme allergic reaction in some people.

Cause is most closely related to this last sense of produce, stressing the relationship between a result and the factors responsible for it.

• A stroke can cause permanent paralysis; Continual conflict among city-states caused the eventual decline of Greek civilization.

On this neutral level, the word points to the dispassionate or scientific tracing of a train of causality, often from the philosophical viewpoint of determinism. More cause their children to grow up warped and apathetic. But a stress on inadvertence rather than on blame can be the point of the word in this use: He had unwittingly caused the accident by misreading a road sign.