"Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increasingly more time to covering national news and less time to covering weather and local news. During the same time period, most of the complaints we received from viewers were concerned with the station's coverage of weather and local news. In addition, several local businesses that used to run advertisements during our late-night news program have just cancelled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to our news programs and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should expand the coverage of weather and local news on all our news programs."
Here the author has provided several premises to strengthen his/her argument, but it seems to have included some self made assumptions ignoring the other side. It also raise some questions whose consideration in making final conclusion is under suspicion. If such assumptions taken into regard do not hold true, it will weaken author`s argument.
The author has first constructed the premise by saying that since past year late night news program has covered more national news and have focused less on weather and local news. First lacking data here is about which news channel author is talking about? Is that a national or a local one. Most of the national news channels cover very few or only essential local news considering their wide coverage and broader targeted audience belonging to the whole nation and not from specific territory. To focus more on regional news, local news channels are exist.
What`s more author has said that complaints have received from viewers regarding station`s coverage of weather and local news. This can not be taken in a way that viewers have reported complain due to not broadcasting news related to weather and local issues. That may be the case that viewers are not satisfied with the news quality they have served. Viewers may accept some essential national news and channel might broadcast some irrelevant cliche national news. Viewers may already got that news on day time and news channel show it on late night as new one which seems stale to viewers.
Another reason author has provided is that local business have stop giving advertisements in this late night news channel shows. For this nothing concrete evidence has provided for such reason, which still open large range of assumptions to think over. Local business might found some other way to promote their business or a direct way to get in touch of customers. News channel advertisement might be less effective to augment local business. And how author can make sure that by restoring their previous schedule and focusing more on local news and weather news will attract local business to advertise more? Some kind of survey need to be conduct to recognize the reason behind viewer`s complain and behind cancellation of advertising contracts.
If news channel company come to know that poor news quality or late coverage of news after incident has occurred and know to viewers is the reason for viewers lessen interest then they can take steps accordingly and it will simultaneously restore the advertisement revenue before restoring their news type to former level.
At last summing up this all, if author would have provided relevant concrete evidence and data- statistics then his/her argument to again switch over to weather and local news to its former level would be more persuasive. Lacking such clarity and evidences make it more or less skeptic and less credible.
argument 1 -- not OK
argument 2 -- not OK
argument 3 -- OK
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flaws:
In GRE/GMAT, we have to accept all data or evidence are true. It is important to find out loopholes behind surveys or studies. Loopholes mean that we accept all surveys told are true, but there are some conditions applied, for example:
It works for time A (10 years ago), but it doesn't mean it works for time B (nowadays).
It works for location A (a city, community, nation), but it doesn't mean it works for location B (another city, community, nation).
It works for people A (a manager), but it doesn't mean it works for people B (a worker).
It works for event A (one event, project... ), but it doesn't mean it works for event B (another event, project...).
more...
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: ? out of 6
Category: Poor Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 22 15
No. of Words: 477 350
No. of Characters: 2366 1500
No. of Different Words: 237 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.673 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.96 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.432 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 159 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 129 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 83 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 37 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21.682 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.083 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.636 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.355 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.576 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.134 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 6 5