61. The following appeared in an article in the Grandview Beacon.
For many years the city of Grandview has provided annual funding for the Grandview Symphony. Last year, however, private contributions to the symphony increased by 200 percent and attendance at the symphony's concerts-in-the-park series doubled. The symphony has also announced an increase in ticket prices for next year. Given such developments, some city commissioners argue that the symphony can now be fully self-supporting, and they recommend that funding for the symphony be eliminated from next year's budget.
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.
The following article introduces the issue that the city of Grandview stops providing annual funding for the Grandview Symphony since it start getting private contributions and attendance doubled. To evaluate the recommendation, there are some points that need to be clear.
The article mentioned that the symphony got more private contributions by 200 percent. Without knowing total amount of annual funding from the city government, it is meaningless. If the amount of private contributions is far less than the annual funding, it would be very difficult for the symphony to keep operating without any supports. Also, the private contributors could be one-time supporters since it is voluntary donations.
On top of that, there are many possible reasons why attendance at the concerts has been doubled; It could be the date people attend more, the weather could be the factor, the ticket was affordable, or the symphony simply gave away a lot of tickets for free to build public reputation or relationship. Moreover, the symphony just announced an increase in ticket prices for the next year. It is the common sense that if the price goes up, its demand goes down. It might cause actual ticket sales down next year. Then, self-supporting is not feasible for the symphony.
It would be very helpful to evaluate the matter if we know actual amount and statistic numbers in this matter. How much is the total funding budget for symphony? How much actually need to operate symphony? How many tickets have been sold over the years? How much do they increase in ticket prices for next year? Actual number will show big pictures since this issue is directly related to “money”.
In my point view of this matter, the city of Grandview should not cut annual funding for the symphony at once. If there are enough evidences that the symphony actually increases available funds through different channels, they should slowly withdraw supports little by little.
flaws:
better to use this pattern for argument essays:
para 1: introduction.
para 2: argument 1
para 3: argument 2
para 4: argument 3
para 5: conclusion
You can put the fourth paragraph as conclusion.
and more content wanted for every argument. For issue essays, around 450+ words, for argument essays, around 400+ words.
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 19 15
No. of Words: 321 350
No. of Characters: 1591 1500
No. of Different Words: 172 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.233 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.956 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.577 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 120 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 85 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 58 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 31 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 16.895 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.427 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.474 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.315 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.537 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.075 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5