The following is a recommendation from the personnel director to the president of Acme Publishing Company."Many other companies have recently stated that having their employees take the Easy Read Speed-Reading Course has greatly improved productivity. One

In order to enhance overall productivity the personnel director recommends requiring all company's employees to finish the Easy Read Speed-Reading Course. This statement is buttressed by evidence which is connected with the conclusion by several assumptions which ought to be carefully scrutinized in order to give a comprehensive estimation of the soundness of the argument.

To begin with, the arguer claims that many companies have appreciably benefited from having their personnel to take the course. However, does the writer managed to create a solid foundation for this arrogant assumption? To answer on this question we need to closely look at evidence. The first case is that one graduate is able to read a 500-page report in two hours. At the same time, this person may be a unique aberration, for example, s/he may be gifted initially and perhaps other graduates cannot read this amount of information is such a short time span. The second evidence of the course effectiveness is that another graduate has been promoted from assistant manager to vice president in under a year. In this case, we may have a correlation/ causation fallacy. Probably, the person decided to participate to the course owing to the his or her expected promotion; moreover, some unstated reasons may lead to the rise, for instance, the assistant manager has relatives in the company's committee who helped him or her with the climbing on the company's top. Therefore, we can conclude that writer's belief in the course's effect on productivity is not warranted.

The second author's assumption is that benefits of taking the course outweigh drawbacks. It is said that the course is cost five hundreds dollar per employee and that educational process include three-week seminar. However, the closer look at the expenditures may reveal some unstated expenses. For instance, participation to the seminar requires personnel to leave the work place thus their work will be not done. Perhaps Acme Publishing Company will have to pay salaries for this three-week seminar to the employees and pay for the travel expenditures as well. Consequently, actual price of having company's employees to take the course is significantly higher than expected $500 per person. Therefore additional information is needed to draw a comprehensive conclusion about the reasonability of the proposed step.

Finally, the argument states that all company's staff should take the Easy Read course. This idea seems to be dubious owing to the fact that only a part of the employees has the necessity to absorb a large volume of information. For instance, the Acme Publishing Company may have security service and personal who work with equipment and machinery. Despite the fact that these people are a part of the company's team they have no obvious need to read 500-page report in order to complete their duty.

In conclusion, the personnel director suggests requiring company's staff to take Easy Read course in order to improve productivity; unfortunately, he does not manage to prove that this course enhances productivity, that it has reasonable costs and that all workers should take the course. In other words, the argument is unwarranted.