The following appeared in a letter to the school board in the town of Centerville."All students should be required to take the driver's education course at Centerville High School. In the past two years several accidents in and around Centerville have inv

The author attempts to propose a solution to the issue of teen driving safety, but makes many erroneous assumptions that undercut the power of their argument. The first of such assumptions appears in the statement that “several accidents in and around Centerville have involved teenage drivers.” Notice that the term several is highly ambiguous - what percentage of teen drivers are causing accidents? Is this higher or lower than the percentage of adult drivers causing accidents? If the difference is not statistically significant, then the motivation for the development of a driving course is completely derailed. The author goes on to use evidence about “a number” of parents making complaints, which suffers from the same statistical ambiguity and subsequently diminishing the preciseness of the argument.

Another logical problem is the fact that the author simply mentions that the accidents occur “in or around Centerville” - she never states that these accidents are perpetrated by Centerville residents. It’s very possible that the driving accidents are caused by people from neighboring communities or tourists from completely different places. In the case that this is true, the city would not be able to improve the driving safety of these visiting drivers through a high school program.

The author writes the extremely bold thesis that a mandatory high school program is the only solution to the teen driving safety problem. This statement is quite one-sided, not taking into account the perspectives of students who do have adequate driving instruction outside of school, forcing them to take a class from which they reap no benefits. More importantly, the author fails to even consider competing strategies which might also help to solve the problem. Creating an elective high school course, finding community volunteers who are willing to instruct driving, and offering a driving instruction fee reduction for students on a budget are all valid alternative paths that the city of Centerville might want to consider. Without any acknowledgement of alternative solutions, the author misses a useful opportunity to highlight the strengths of her proposal over the alternatives.

Votes
Average: 6.9 (3 votes)
Essay Categories
Essays by the user:

Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, but, first, if, so, then, such as

Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments

Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 14.0 19.6327345309 71% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 3.0 12.9520958084 23% => OK
Conjunction : 7.0 11.1786427146 63% => OK
Relative clauses : 15.0 13.6137724551 110% => OK
Pronoun: 20.0 28.8173652695 69% => OK
Preposition: 45.0 55.5748502994 81% => OK
Nominalization: 14.0 16.3942115768 85% => OK

Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1896.0 2260.96107784 84% => OK
No of words: 339.0 441.139720559 77% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.59292035398 5.12650576532 109% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.29091512845 4.56307096286 94% => OK
Word Length SD: 3.08763814974 2.78398813304 111% => OK
Unique words: 198.0 204.123752495 97% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.58407079646 0.468620217663 125% => OK
syllable_count: 588.6 705.55239521 83% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.59920159681 106% => OK

A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 1.0 4.96107784431 20% => OK
Article: 8.0 8.76447105788 91% => OK
Subordination: 1.0 2.70958083832 37% => OK
Conjunction: 2.0 1.67365269461 119% => OK
Preposition: 4.0 4.22255489022 95% => OK

Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 13.0 19.7664670659 66% => 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: 26.0 22.8473053892 114% => OK
Sentence length SD: 52.0124017983 57.8364921388 90% => OK
Chars per sentence: 145.846153846 119.503703932 122% => OK
Words per sentence: 26.0769230769 23.324526521 112% => OK
Discourse Markers: 3.0 5.70786347227 53% => More transition words/phrases wanted.
Paragraphs: 3.0 5.15768463074 58% => More paragraphs wanted.
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 6.0 8.20758483034 73% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 7.0 6.88822355289 102% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 0.0 4.67664670659 0% => More facts, knowledge or examples wanted.
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?

Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.265825520213 0.218282227539 122% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0852461971606 0.0743258471296 115% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0813532212405 0.0701772020484 116% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.183614329199 0.128457276422 143% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0471916280924 0.0628817314937 75% => OK

Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 17.9 14.3799401198 124% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 36.63 48.3550499002 76% => OK
smog_index: 11.2 7.1628742515 156% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 14.6 12.197005988 120% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 15.44 12.5979740519 123% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 9.68 8.32208582834 116% => OK
difficult_words: 102.0 98.500998004 104% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 11.5 12.3882235529 93% => OK
gunning_fog: 12.4 11.1389221557 111% => OK
text_standard: 12.0 11.9071856287 101% => OK
What are above readability scores?

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Minimum four paragraphs wanted.

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.

flaws:
need to argue this:
All students should be required to take the driver's education course at Centerville High School.

maybe only some of them need the courses.

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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: 14 15
No. of Words: 339 350
No. of Characters: 1819 1500
No. of Different Words: 188 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.291 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.366 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.879 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 149 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 116 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 80 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 56 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 24.214 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.252 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.286 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.341 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.5 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.127 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 3 5