Essay topics:
The following appeared in a memorandum issued by a large city's council on the arts:
"In a recent citywide poll, 15 percent more residents said that they watch television programs about the visual arts than was the case in a poll conducted five years ago. During these past five years, the number of people visiting our city's art museums has increased by a similar percentage. Since the corporate funding that supports public television, where most of the visual arts programs appear, is now being threatened with severe cuts, we can expect that attendance at our city's art museums will also start to decrease. Thus some of the city's funds for supporting the arts should be reallocated to public television."
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.
This argument claims that the city should reallocate some funds to public television as it’s expected that the number of people visiting museum will start to decrease with the cut funds. The line of reasoning is that the number of people who visit museum has been increased by a similar percentage as that of those who watch TV programs about visual arts in the past five years. I found this is not sound, however, by following reasons:
Firstly, the author drew an assumption that the people who will visit museum are only the residents who watch TV programs about visual arts. However, as one of the most attractive place of a city, a museum would attract a lot of other visitors like travelers and artists. Also, many schools and universities will organize the museum tours for their students very frequently. It’s very likely that the increased number of museum visitor is not only from the TV audience, which means the fund cut in supporting visual arts on TV program will not necessarily make the number of museum visitors decreased.
Secondly, the author did not take into consideration that the city might have advertised visual art via different media, other than relying on TV program solely. Nowadays, there’re a lot of choice of media for advertising, like website advertising, email advertising and magazine advertising, etc., TV program is not the only one and cheapest one to promote visual arts any more. There’s a chance that the city has invested some funds on other media to advertise visual art so that it could gain the increased number of museum visitors. If this is the case, there’s no guarantee that the fund in supporting visual art on TV program was the only reason of the increasing number of visitors.
In sum, this argument is not convincing because the author fails to address some important factors that should be taken into consideration. It would be more compelling if the author could consider the diversity of museum visitors and the other medias that might be used by the city to promote visual arts.
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Comments
Essay evaluation report
argument 1 -- OK
argument 2 -- not really. suppose TV is the only media advertised visual art, then how to argue?
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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: 13 15
No. of Words: 349 350
No. of Characters: 1657 1500
No. of Different Words: 165 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.322 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.748 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.467 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 116 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 76 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 54 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 33 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.846 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.892 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.615 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.398 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.596 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.072 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 8, column 1, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...ed by the city to promote visual arts.
^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, first, firstly, however, if, second, secondly, so
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 12.0 19.6327345309 61% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 12.0 12.9520958084 93% => OK
Conjunction : 5.0 11.1786427146 45% => More conjunction wanted.
Relative clauses : 17.0 13.6137724551 125% => OK
Pronoun: 22.0 28.8173652695 76% => OK
Preposition: 41.0 55.5748502994 74% => OK
Nominalization: 6.0 16.3942115768 37% => More nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1728.0 2260.96107784 76% => OK
No of words: 348.0 441.139720559 79% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 4.96551724138 5.12650576532 97% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.31911543099 4.56307096286 95% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.65537144102 2.78398813304 95% => OK
Unique words: 165.0 204.123752495 81% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.474137931034 0.468620217663 101% => OK
syllable_count: 532.8 705.55239521 76% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 4.0 4.96107784431 81% => OK
Article: 4.0 8.76447105788 46% => OK
Subordination: 2.0 2.70958083832 74% => OK
Conjunction: 0.0 1.67365269461 0% => OK
Preposition: 3.0 4.22255489022 71% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 12.0 19.7664670659 61% => Need more sentences. Double check the format of sentences, make sure there is a space between two sentences, or have enough periods. And also check the lengths of sentences, maybe they are too long.
Sentence length: 29.0 22.8473053892 127% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively long.
Sentence length SD: 36.2846577618 57.8364921388 63% => OK
Chars per sentence: 144.0 119.503703932 120% => OK
Words per sentence: 29.0 23.324526521 124% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.58333333333 5.70786347227 80% => OK
Paragraphs: 4.0 5.15768463074 78% => More paragraphs wanted.
Language errors: 1.0 5.25449101796 19% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 7.0 8.20758483034 85% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 2.0 6.88822355289 29% => More negative sentences wanted.
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 3.0 4.67664670659 64% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.174666634042 0.218282227539 80% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0744175468089 0.0743258471296 100% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0487090501546 0.0701772020484 69% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.108334121705 0.128457276422 84% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0461851078933 0.0628817314937 73% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 16.5 14.3799401198 115% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 50.5 48.3550499002 104% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.4 12.197005988 110% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 12.14 12.5979740519 96% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.07 8.32208582834 97% => OK
difficult_words: 66.0 98.500998004 67% => More difficult words wanted.
linsear_write_formula: 17.0 12.3882235529 137% => OK
gunning_fog: 13.6 11.1389221557 122% => OK
text_standard: 17.0 11.9071856287 143% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 50.0 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 3.0 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.