The following is a letter to the editor of the Atticus City newspaper.
"Former Mayor Durant owes an apology to the city of Atticus. Both the damage to the River Bridge, which connects Atticus to Hartley, and the traffic problems we have long experienced on the bridge were actually caused 20 years ago by Durant. After all, he is the one who approved the construction of the bridge. If he had approved a wider and better-designed bridge, on which approximately the same amount of public money would have been spent, none of the damage or problems would have occurred. Instead, the River Bridge has deteriorated far more rapidly over the past 20 years than has the much longer Derby Bridge up the river. Even though the winters have been severe in the past several years, this is no excuse for the negligence and wastefulness of Durant." - GRE Argument 39
This editorial concludes that Mayor Durant's approval of the River Bridge construction 20 years ago was the cause of current traffic and deterioration problems at the bridge. To support this conclusion, the editorial points out that a nearby bridge is not experiencing similar problems. However, the editorial relies on a number of doubtful assumptions and is therefore unconvincing.
First of all, since the bridge is 20 years old it is unfair to assign blame for recent traffic problems and deterioration to Durant or to anyone else involved in the initial bridge building project. Given this ...
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.0 out of 6
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 21 15
No. of Words: 522 350
No. of Characters: 2754 1500
No. of Different Words: 234 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.78 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.276 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.781 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 223 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 166 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 119 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 63 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 24.857 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.809 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.619 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.357 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.584 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.089 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 6 5