The following appeared in an announcement issued by the publisher of The Mercury, a weekly newspaper:
"Since a competing lower-priced newspaper, The Bugle, was started five years ago, The Mercury's circulation has declined by 10,000 readers. The best way to get more people to read The Mercury is to reduce its price below that of The Bugle, at least until circulation increases to former levels. The increased circulation of The Mercury will attract more businesses to buy advertising space in the paper."
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.
The announcement from The Mercury newspaper concludes that The Mercury should decrease its price lower than that of its competitor – The Bugle, in order to gain more circulations. The line of reasoning is that The mercury’s circulation has started to decrease since The bugle started its business. Moreover, it also assumes that increased circulation will bring more advertising businesses to Mercury. However, I find that this argument is not convincing, as it is flawed for following reasons.
First of all, the author readily assumes that the competition from the Bugle newspaper has been the main reason causing Mercury’s circulation to decrease over the last five years. However, the competition from other competitors should be also taken into consideration. It could be possible that the Bugle is not the only newspaper company competing with the Mercury. Therefore, it would be imprudent for Mercury to adjust its price without considering the overall competition on the market.
Furthermore, the argument predicts that the Mercury will gain more businesses from advertising if the circulation gets to increase. This assumption is not sound, however, because it takes for granted that the customers only care about circulation when considering where to put their advertisement. The companies which invest money on the advertisement always expect their money to be spent on the right channel, so the precise targeting of the readers is very important to them. There’s no guarantee that the Mercury will attract more advertising business if their readers are not the main target of those companies which will buy advertisement on newspaper.
Finally, the author made the assumption solely based on the external cause and overlooked the possibility of inner problem of Mercury. It might be true that there are some serious problems inside the organization which caused it circulation decreasing, such as bad quality of writers and inefficient management team. Consequently, the author would have to prove that the Mercury’s failure is solely because of the competition from the Bugle, rather than its inner problem.
In summary, this argument is not reasonable as it omits a lot of factors that should be addressed. In order to make proper conclusion, the author would have to consider other competition on the market, the real interest from the advertising customers and the inner problem of the Mercury.
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Comments
Essay evaluation report
argument 1 -- maybe there are other external reasons too like: financial crisis; less populations...
argument 2 -- OK
argument 3 -- OK, can be put inside argument 1
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flaws:
also need to argue:
The best way to get more people to read The Mercury is to reduce its price below that of The Bugle, at least until circulation increases to former levels.
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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: 17 15
No. of Words: 380 350
No. of Characters: 1990 1500
No. of Different Words: 181 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.415 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.237 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.839 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 141 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 119 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 78 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 62 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 22.353 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 5.96 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.765 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.361 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.579 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.066 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, consequently, finally, first, furthermore, however, if, look, moreover, so, therefore, in summary, such as, first of all
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 17.0 19.6327345309 87% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 12.0 12.9520958084 93% => OK
Conjunction : 3.0 11.1786427146 27% => More conjunction wanted.
Relative clauses : 18.0 13.6137724551 132% => OK
Pronoun: 35.0 28.8173652695 121% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 47.0 55.5748502994 85% => OK
Nominalization: 23.0 16.3942115768 140% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2066.0 2260.96107784 91% => OK
No of words: 381.0 441.139720559 86% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.42257217848 5.12650576532 106% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.41805628031 4.56307096286 97% => OK
Word Length SD: 3.0297423658 2.78398813304 109% => OK
Unique words: 182.0 204.123752495 89% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.477690288714 0.468620217663 102% => OK
syllable_count: 644.4 705.55239521 91% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.59920159681 106% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 7.0 4.96107784431 141% => OK
Article: 10.0 8.76447105788 114% => 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: 17.0 19.7664670659 86% => OK
Sentence length: 22.0 22.8473053892 96% => OK
Sentence length SD: 36.7181352098 57.8364921388 63% => OK
Chars per sentence: 121.529411765 119.503703932 102% => OK
Words per sentence: 22.4117647059 23.324526521 96% => OK
Discourse Markers: 7.41176470588 5.70786347227 130% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 7.0 8.20758483034 85% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 5.0 6.88822355289 73% => 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: 0.162580884709 0.218282227539 74% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0550234799014 0.0743258471296 74% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0515915225137 0.0701772020484 74% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0908990943094 0.128457276422 71% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0605298573198 0.0628817314937 96% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 15.3 14.3799401198 106% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 40.69 48.3550499002 84% => OK
smog_index: 11.2 7.1628742515 156% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.1 12.197005988 107% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 14.45 12.5979740519 115% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.42 8.32208582834 101% => OK
difficult_words: 89.0 98.500998004 90% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 12.0 12.3882235529 97% => OK
gunning_fog: 10.8 11.1389221557 97% => OK
text_standard: 11.0 11.9071856287 92% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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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.