The following appeared as a letter to the editor of a national newspaper.
"Your recent article on corporate downsizing* in Elthyria maintains that the majority of competent workers who have lost jobs as a result of downsizing face serious economic hardship, often for years, before finding other suitable employment. But this claim is undermined by a recent report on the Elthyrian economy, which found that since 1999 far more jobs have been created than have been eliminated, bringing the unemployment rate in Elthyria to its lowest level in decades. Moreover, two-thirds of these newly created jobs have been in industries that tend to pay above-average wages, and the vast majority of these jobs are full-time."
*Downsizing is the process whereby corporations deliberately make themselves smaller, reducing the number of their employees.
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 given argument prompt, the author of the letter claims that corporate downsizing in Elthyria does not result in economic suffering for the ones who lose their jobs and that they find apposite alternative jobs quite shortly thereafter. The author of the letter comes to this conclusion on the basis of a recent report on Elthyrian economy. However, before the claim (based on three unwarranted assumptions) of the author can be accepted as true, following three evidences must be provided by the author to substantiate his claim.
To begin with, the author needs to provide evidence that the recent Elthyrian economy report correctly represents the trend of the Elthyrian Workforce. It might be the case that the report was conducted intermittently and took datapoints in an interval spanning several years e.g. the report took the data of 1999, 2004,2009 and so on and did not consider the actual addition and cuts in no. of jobs between these 5 years gap which may considerably change the outlook of workforce pattern or in fact reverses the claimed trend. Also, it is possible that the report did not follow a scientific and foolproof method to reach its conclusion in which case the value of the report shall be severely undermined. If any of these two cases prove to be true, this evidence shall greatly weaken the argument’s persuasiveness.
Secondly, even if the report on Elthyrian economy has merit, the author must provide evidence to support his assumption that the jobs being created and the jobs being cut down match in renumeration to the competent employees and if not so, the employee simply wouldn’t leave the job for better prospects in other cities. Perhaps the new jobs being created provide salaries considerably lower than the employee’s skills merit which would not help in significantly reducing his financial problems. In addition, it is important to know the attrition rate of the employees in these “new jobs” being created to assess whether these new openings are actually filled with competent employees or if they are indeed filled up, the employees actually retain their job for a long enough period. This evidence, if proved true, shall weaken the claim of the author considerably.
Finally, the author needs to provide evidence in support of his assumption that the remaining one-third of the workforce which receive lower than average minimum wage is not significant. It is possible that the total number of workers in Elthyrian are in tens of thousands (for the sake of the argument, say 90,000) in which case one third of the workforce would account for about 30,000 people which is a significant number of people and even if 50% of these 30,000 people are supporting a family, it puts a tremendous economic burden on their lives. In addition, the author assumes the “vast majority” of these jobs being on full time implies job stability for them. What if out of these 60,000 employed people, 40,000 employees work on full time basis and the other 20,000, however competent, are continuously being laid off after every few months. These people will then again face the economic burden till such time they find alternative occupations. Thus, if any of the above stated two assumptions are not supported by concrete evidence, it hampers the overall persuasiveness of the author’s argument.
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Comments
e-rater score report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 3.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 17 15
No. of Words: 553 350
No. of Characters: 2724 1500
No. of Different Words: 260 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.849 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.926 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.627 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 198 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 137 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 104 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 66 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 32.529 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 16.292 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.824 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.354 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.354 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.123 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 1 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 4, column 625, Rule ID: EN_COMPOUNDS
Message: This word is normally spelled as one.
Suggestion: fulltime
... “vast majority” of these jobs being on full time implies job stability for them. What if...
^^^^^^^^^
Line 4, column 737, Rule ID: EN_COMPOUNDS
Message: This word is normally spelled as one.
Suggestion: fulltime
...ployed people, 40,000 employees work on full time basis and the other 20,000, however com...
^^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
actually, also, e.g., finally, however, if, look, may, second, secondly, so, then, third, thus, in addition, in fact, to begin with
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 23.0 19.6327345309 117% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 11.0 12.9520958084 85% => OK
Conjunction : 12.0 11.1786427146 107% => OK
Relative clauses : 15.0 13.6137724551 110% => OK
Pronoun: 37.0 28.8173652695 128% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 73.0 55.5748502994 131% => OK
Nominalization: 16.0 16.3942115768 98% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2795.0 2260.96107784 124% => OK
No of words: 552.0 441.139720559 125% => OK
Chars per words: 5.0634057971 5.12650576532 99% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.84713113593 4.56307096286 106% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.72125269129 2.78398813304 98% => OK
Unique words: 269.0 204.123752495 132% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.48731884058 0.468620217663 104% => OK
syllable_count: 846.0 705.55239521 120% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 9.0 4.96107784431 181% => OK
Article: 9.0 8.76447105788 103% => OK
Subordination: 5.0 2.70958083832 185% => OK
Conjunction: 0.0 1.67365269461 0% => OK
Preposition: 6.0 4.22255489022 142% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 18.0 19.7664670659 91% => OK
Sentence length: 30.0 22.8473053892 131% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively long.
Sentence length SD: 76.7834255842 57.8364921388 133% => OK
Chars per sentence: 155.277777778 119.503703932 130% => OK
Words per sentence: 30.6666666667 23.324526521 131% => OK
Discourse Markers: 7.27777777778 5.70786347227 128% => OK
Paragraphs: 4.0 5.15768463074 78% => More paragraphs wanted.
Language errors: 2.0 5.25449101796 38% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 4.0 8.20758483034 49% => More positive sentences wanted.
Sentences with negative sentiment : 9.0 6.88822355289 131% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 5.0 4.67664670659 107% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.104380172031 0.218282227539 48% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0361357062653 0.0743258471296 49% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0505853586085 0.0701772020484 72% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0724019503328 0.128457276422 56% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0526922524128 0.0628817314937 84% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 17.7 14.3799401198 123% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 49.49 48.3550499002 102% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.8 12.197005988 113% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 12.66 12.5979740519 100% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.61 8.32208582834 103% => OK
difficult_words: 122.0 98.500998004 124% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 14.0 12.3882235529 113% => OK
gunning_fog: 14.0 11.1389221557 126% => OK
text_standard: 14.0 11.9071856287 118% => 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.