The following appeared as part of an editorial in an industry newsletter.
“While trucking companies that deliver goods pay only a portion of highway maintenance costs and no property tax on the highways they use, railways spend billions per year maintaining and upgrading their facilities. The government should lower the railroad companies’ property taxes, since sending goods by rail is clearly a more appropriate mode of ground transportation than highway shipping. For one thing, trains consume only a third of the fuel a truck would use to carry the same load, making them a more cost-effective and environmentally sound mode of transport. Furthermore, since rail lines already exist, increases in rail traffic would not require building new lines at the expense of taxpaying citizens.”
Discuss how well reasoned... etc
The argument talks about the different types of tax and lends support to a claim suggesting lowering of taxes for railway corporations. This claim is then supported by two weakly supported reasons and thus is subject to further argument. The reasons forwarded by the author of this argument are not well researched and lacks factual support.
First, the author tries to establish a definitive linkage between the tax paid and amount of maintenance and upgradation taken place by corresponding corporation either railway or trucking. This linkage lacks any further evidence as to what is the amount of highway maintenance tax paid by the trucking industry and on the viability of adding further property tax to the bucket.
Second, author mentions one of the two reasons, cited as support to the argument, to be the fuel consumption by train as compared to trucks per unit load. This line of reason is clearly not warranted for. Two major questions need to be answered before concluding such a claim – What is the difference between average frequency of deliveries made by trucks and rails? And How are the recipients of rail and truck deliveries distributed across country? For one, they could be sparsely distributed and taking complete rail for a small delivery is not in the best interest of the corporation. Additionally there is no clear explanation provided for how the fuel consumption affects the environment, because if the rail is traveling to different destinations for small deliveries it ends up consuming lot more fuel and correspondingly emitting lot more pollution
Third, existence of the rail lines has been taken as an undue advantage in the comparison of train versus trucks. The author fails to mention the current and future projections of rail usage and current scenario of the rail tracks. There could be cases where a place is reachable only by the trucks and not by the rail. Constructing completely new railway framework for such locations is not accounted for in the author’s reasoning and hence the reasoning is ill-supported.
In conclusion, our faith in the author’s claim and conclusion would have been strengthened if he or her mentioned the data points required for a complete analysis of the scenario. The incomplete information mentioned and weakly supported reasons make it difficult for the reader to make a fair comparison between the two entities and reach out to a conclusion in alignment with what the author cited. Cited this way, the argument lacks foundational aspects and required support to strengthen the conclusion. Hence, the argument is not well reasoned and open for further debate and questioning.
| Post date | Users | Rates | Link to Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-12-03 | vipul.sahni | 75 | 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: 19 15
No. of Words: 432 350
No. of Characters: 2185 1500
No. of Different Words: 210 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.559 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.058 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.878 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 157 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 130 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 98 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 67 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 22.737 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 8.025 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.526 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.301 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.543 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.085 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 5, column 590, Rule ID: SENT_START_CONJUNCTIVE_LINKING_ADVERB_COMMA[1]
Message: Did you forget a comma after a conjunctive/linking adverb?
Suggestion: Additionally,
...n the best interest of the corporation. Additionally there is no clear explanation provided ...
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
but, first, hence, if, second, so, then, third, thus, well, as to, in conclusion
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 20.0 19.6327345309 102% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 4.0 12.9520958084 31% => OK
Conjunction : 23.0 11.1786427146 206% => Less conjunction wanted
Relative clauses : 1.0 13.6137724551 7% => More relative clauses wanted.
Pronoun: 11.0 28.8173652695 38% => OK
Preposition: 54.0 55.5748502994 97% => OK
Nominalization: 22.0 16.3942115768 134% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2238.0 2260.96107784 99% => OK
No of words: 433.0 441.139720559 98% => OK
Chars per words: 5.16859122402 5.12650576532 101% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.56165014514 4.56307096286 100% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.97270355659 2.78398813304 107% => OK
Unique words: 215.0 204.123752495 105% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.496535796767 0.468620217663 106% => OK
syllable_count: 682.2 705.55239521 97% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.6 1.59920159681 100% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 7.0 8.76447105788 80% => OK
Subordination: 1.0 2.70958083832 37% => OK
Conjunction: 1.0 1.67365269461 60% => OK
Preposition: 2.0 4.22255489022 47% => More preposition wanted as sentence beginning.
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 18.0 19.7664670659 91% => OK
Sentence length: 24.0 22.8473053892 105% => OK
Sentence length SD: 72.5559171337 57.8364921388 125% => OK
Chars per sentence: 124.333333333 119.503703932 104% => OK
Words per sentence: 24.0555555556 23.324526521 103% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.44444444444 5.70786347227 78% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 1.0 5.25449101796 19% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 5.0 8.20758483034 61% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 7.0 6.88822355289 102% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 6.0 4.67664670659 128% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.0929739316903 0.218282227539 43% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0310276047312 0.0743258471296 42% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0393517870986 0.0701772020484 56% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0586903925538 0.128457276422 46% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0476701931519 0.0628817314937 76% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 15.0 14.3799401198 104% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 47.12 48.3550499002 97% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 12.7 12.197005988 104% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 13.0 12.5979740519 103% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.77 8.32208582834 105% => OK
difficult_words: 108.0 98.500998004 110% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 11.0 12.3882235529 89% => OK
gunning_fog: 11.6 11.1389221557 104% => OK
text_standard: 13.0 11.9071856287 109% => OK
What are above readability scores?
---------------------
Rates: 66.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.0 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.