People who are the most deeply committed to an idea or policy are the most critical of it. - GRE Issue 61

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People who are the most deeply committed to an idea or policy are the most critical of it. - GRE Issue 61

The speaker claims that people who are the most fmnly committed to an idea or policy are the same people who are most critical of that idea or policy. While I find this claim paradoxical on its face, the paradox is explainable, and the explanation is well supported empirically. Nevertheless, the claim is an unfair generalization in that it fails to account for other empirical evidence serving to discredit it.

A threshold problem with the speaker's claim is that its internal logic is questionable. At first impression it would seem that firm commitment to an idea or policy necessarily re...

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2010-09-11 smartPig 85 view
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Sentence: The speaker claims that people who are the most fmnly committed to an idea or policy are the same people who are most critical of that idea or policy.
Error: fmnly Suggestion: fully

Sentence: One possible explanation for the paradox is that individuals most fmnly committed to an idea or policy are often the same people who are most knowledgeable on the subject, and therefore are in the best position to understand and appreciate the problems with the idea or policy.
Error: fmnly Suggestion: fully

Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.0 out of 6
Category: Very good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 2 2
No. of Sentences: 24 15
No. of Words: 650 350
No. of Characters: 3303 1500
No. of Different Words: 316 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 5.049 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.082 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.816 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 237 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 187 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 144 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 102 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27.083 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 14.35 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.75 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.284 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.482 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.111 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5