The following appeared as part of a campaign to sell advertising time on a local radio station to local business
“The Cumquat Café began advertising on our local radio station this year and was delighted to see its business increase by 10 percent over last year’s totals. Their success shows how you can use radio advertising to make your business more profitable"
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
In this argument, the author concludes that your business will be more profitable if you use advertising on radio. This conclusion is based on one example about a Café, named Cumquat Café, used a local radio advertising and increased their business by 10 percent. The conclusion of the argument relies on assumptions for which there is no clear evidence. Hence, the argument is unconvincing and has several flaws.
First, the argument readily assumes that advertising on the radio has caused increasing in café business. However, just because advertising on the local radio station and increasing sales of the Cumquat café happen at the same time, it is not necessarily true that advertising on radio caused the business of the Café rise. For example, increasing population in that town can cause the revenue of this café increased because the demand goes up.
Secondly, the argument claims that radio advertising makes Cumquat Café increased its business means that this method can be used to other business and be succeeded. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not demonstrate any correlation between a Café and other business.
Thirdly, this advertising method may work for last year only, not now or in the future. It is entirely possible that if we use advertising on the radio from now on. It will not be successful to promote business and increasing sales.
To conclude, this argument is not convincing as it stands. To strengthen it, the author should eliminate other cause for rising business of the Cumquat café except for advertising on the radio station. Also, the author should have a conclusion on other business which is related to Café.
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flaws:
No. of Words: 280 350
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 15 15
No. of Words: 280 350
No. of Characters: 1373 1500
No. of Different Words: 131 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.091 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.904 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.699 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 92 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 75 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 55 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 33 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 18.667 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.077 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.667 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.389 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.618 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.13 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5