Scandals---whether in politics, academia, or other areas---can be useful. They focus our attention on problems in ways that no speaker or reformer ever could. - GRE Issue 93
Are scandals useful in calling our attention to important problems, as this statement suggests? I agree that in many cases scandals can serve to reveal larger problems that a community or society should address. On the other hand, scandals can sometimes distract us from more important societal issues.
On the one hand, scandals can sometimes serve to call our attention to pervasive social or political problems that we would otherwise neglect. Perhaps the paradigmatic modern example is the Watergate scandal. Early in that scandal it would have been tempting to dismiss it as involving one i...
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.5 out of 6
Category: Excellent Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 29 15
No. of Words: 576 350
No. of Characters: 3065 1500
No. of Different Words: 286 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.899 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.321 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.899 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 252 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 199 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 132 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 89 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 19.862 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 8.799 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.483 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.291 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.453 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.105 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5