from a letter to the editor of a city newspaper
one recent research study has indicated that many adolescents need more sleep than they are getting, and another study has shown that many high school students in our city are actually dissatisfied with their own academic performance. as a way of combating these problems, the high schools in our city should begin classes at 8:30 A.M. instead of 7:30, and end the school an hour later. This arrangement will give students an extra hour of sleep in the morning, thereby making them more alert and more productive. Consequently, the students will perform better on tests and other assignments, and their academic skills will improve significantly.
The writer of the argument recommends that if high schools want to upgrade their student performance and learning ability, they should start one hour later to let their students sleep more in the morning. However, this recommendation cannot be accepted because it rests on a number of premises all of which can be challenged in one way or another.
The first problem with the argument is that the author refers to a study about high school students’ performance but does not indicate how many people took part in the study reported. In research studies the greater the number of the people in the sample, the more reliable and valid the findings are. Maybe only ten people participated in this study; hence, the findings of such a study are neither reliable nor valid. Even if it is assumed that enough people took part in this study, there is still another problem with the other study. In a research study, the findings can be generalized to the target population if the sample used is representative of the concerned population in terms of age, sex, social class, culture, etc.; however, in this argument there is no evidence to show that the sample used for the study about adolescents’ need of sleep was representative of the high school students. It follows that the findings of this study cannot be applied to the members of the high school students without reservations.
Another problem with the argument is that the writer assumes that lackluster academic performance of high school's students has happened because they have sleep deprivation; however, there is no evidence to prove that their poor performance actually happened because of lack of sleep. For example, maybe lackluster performance has happened because the teachers are novice and are not able to prepare students well enough.
A third problem with the argument is that the writer assumes that things remain the same over the time; however, in most cases this is not true. Maybe starting schools later causes that students go to bed later; therefore, it cannot give them an extra hour of sleep.
At the final analysis, the writer's recommendation cannot be taken to be correct because, as it was shown in the body paragraphs above, it depends on a number of assumptions each of which is questionable. The recommendation can only be accepted if the weaknesses already referred are all removed.
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argument 1 -- not OK. Need to argue what is the correlation between the two studies. Suppose studies have with enough samples.
argument 2 -- not OK. need to argue 'This arrangement will give students an extra hour of sleep in the morning, thereby making them more alert and more productive.'
argument 3 -- not exactly. Need to ague the conclusion 'Consequently, the students will perform better on tests and other assignments, and their academic skills will improve significantly'
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: ? out of 6
Category: ? Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 14 15
No. of Words: 397 350
No. of Characters: 1927 1500
No. of Different Words: 179 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.464 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.854 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.634 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 136 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 105 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 66 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 27 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 28.357 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 11.696 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.786 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.374 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.645 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.114 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5