The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station.
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"Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this time period, most of the complaints received from viewers were concerned with our station's coverage of weather and local news. In addition, local businesses that used to advertise during our late-night news program have just canceled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to the program and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should restore the time devoted to weather and local news to its former level."
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Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.
In the argument, the business manager recommends that as if the goal is to attract more audiences and profit, the program should restore the time on weather and local news. However, the proposed statements are flawed in several respects. So, before assessing the efficacy of the claim, several pieces of evidence need to be established.
First, we are told the alarming news that during the past year, viewers argue that the coverage of weather and local news was been overly occupied by the national news. Still, before we accept this as a fact, the manager should bring out some evidence that the negative responses from viewers take up a large percentage. The sample pool should be able to represent the majority of audiences. However, we see no such procedures and have good reasons to doubt if the result is representative enough to reflect that the new arrangement is negative.
Then we were told that due to this new arrangement, local companies stopped the advertisement contract to the late-night news program. Just for the record here, the memo does not provide any evidence on what reason leads the contract to end. It could be, what, however, that the local businesses are approaching an alternative way to promote themselves through cheaper methods, for say printed posters. Unless the author can state out a specific reason that the contract is directly connected to the shortening of weather and local news, we can not say so with any certainty.
So to avoid losing any more viewers, the program should restore the time to the previous level. Before embarking on some great big changes to the program, the manager should be able to evaluate all the reasons on why to switch back. The weakness of this argument is that it simply could not prove the connection between the new program and its effect. The author seems to assume that the correlation between the canceled contract and the new program should be the main cause. So clearly, the manager needs to think this through, yes, more slowly.
The best we can say about this proposal is that it tells us what we already knew: Experts should find the main reason on why the contract ended and whether there are high percentages of negative responses. Yet, to strengthen it, the manager needs to provide detail and comprehensive evidence.
| Post date | Users | Rates | Link to Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-09-05 | leematt1214 | 61 | view |
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Comments
Essay evaluation report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 18 15
No. of Words: 391 350
No. of Characters: 1865 1500
No. of Different Words: 194 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.447 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.77 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.487 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 138 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 105 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 60 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 30 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21.722 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.437 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.611 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.317 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.553 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.127 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 5, column 123, Rule ID: WAS_BEEN[1]
Message: Did you mean 'was' or 'has been'?
Suggestion: was; has been
... the coverage of weather and local news was been overly occupied by the national news. S...
^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
first, however, if, so, still, then
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 18.0 19.6327345309 92% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 13.0 12.9520958084 100% => OK
Conjunction : 9.0 11.1786427146 81% => OK
Relative clauses : 11.0 13.6137724551 81% => OK
Pronoun: 30.0 28.8173652695 104% => OK
Preposition: 49.0 55.5748502994 88% => OK
Nominalization: 11.0 16.3942115768 67% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1932.0 2260.96107784 85% => OK
No of words: 391.0 441.139720559 89% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 4.94117647059 5.12650576532 96% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.44676510885 4.56307096286 97% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.55744756849 2.78398813304 92% => OK
Unique words: 204.0 204.123752495 100% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.521739130435 0.468620217663 111% => OK
syllable_count: 588.6 705.55239521 83% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 13.0 8.76447105788 148% => OK
Subordination: 4.0 2.70958083832 148% => OK
Conjunction: 0.0 1.67365269461 0% => OK
Preposition: 5.0 4.22255489022 118% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 18.0 19.7664670659 91% => OK
Sentence length: 21.0 22.8473053892 92% => OK
Sentence length SD: 40.0247222984 57.8364921388 69% => OK
Chars per sentence: 107.333333333 119.503703932 90% => OK
Words per sentence: 21.7222222222 23.324526521 93% => OK
Discourse Markers: 1.94444444444 5.70786347227 34% => More transition words/phrases wanted.
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 1.0 5.25449101796 19% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 8.0 8.20758483034 97% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 6.0 6.88822355289 87% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 4.0 4.67664670659 86% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.223764086436 0.218282227539 103% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0677211856879 0.0743258471296 91% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0877542553366 0.0701772020484 125% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.122014162812 0.128457276422 95% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0562294612989 0.0628817314937 89% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 12.7 14.3799401198 88% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 58.62 48.3550499002 121% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 10.3 12.197005988 84% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 11.37 12.5979740519 90% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.35 8.32208582834 100% => OK
difficult_words: 91.0 98.500998004 92% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 10.5 12.3882235529 85% => OK
gunning_fog: 10.4 11.1389221557 93% => OK
text_standard: 11.0 11.9071856287 92% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 83.33 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 5.0 Out of 6
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.