The following is a letter that recently appeared in the Oak City Gazette, a local newspaper. "Membership in Oak City's Civic Club---a club whose primary objective is to discuss local issues---should continue to be restricted to people who live in Oak Cit

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The following is a letter that recently appeared in the Oak City Gazette, a local newspaper.

"Membership in Oak City's Civic Club---a club whose primary objective is to discuss local issues---should continue to be restricted to people who live in Oak City. People who work-in Oak City but who live elsewhere cannot truly understand the business and politics of the city. It is important to restrict membership to city residents because only residents pay city taxes and therefore only residents understand how the money could best be used to improve the city. At any rate, restricting membership in this way is unlikely to disappoint many of the nonresidents employed in Oak City, since neighboring Elm City's Civic Club has always had an open membership policy, and only twenty-five nonresidents have joined Elm City's Club in the last ten years." - GRE Argument 65

This letter recommends that membership in Oak City's Civic Club, the primary objective of which is to discuss local issues, be limited to local residents. To support this recommendation, the author claims that since only residents pay local taxes they are the only people who sufficiently understand local business and political issues. The author also cites the fact that in the last ten years very few non-residents of Oak City who work in Oak City have joined nearby Elm City's civic club, which is open to any person. The argument suffers from two critical flaws and is therefore unpersuasive as it stands.

To begin with, the letter fails to adequately support the claim that since only residents pay local taxes only they truly understand local business and political issues. Even given the dubious assumption that being a local taxpayer affords one an understanding of local business and political issues, it is fallacious to conclude that being a local taxpayer is a necessary condition for understanding these issues. Moreover, common sense tells me that local business people, residents or not, would probably be more intimately involved in many such issues than local residents who do not have business interests in the town. Having failed to address this distinct possibility, the letter is wholly unconvincing.

In further support of the recommendation, the letter cites the fact that nearby Elm City's civic club is open to any person, yet very few Oak City business people who are not residents have joined Elm City's club in the last ten years. But this fact alone lends no support to the recommendation. It is possible, for instance, that these business people have no connection with Elm City whatsoever, or that these business people have been members of Elm City's civic club for longer than ten years. The author must eliminate these possibilities in order to rely justifiably on this evidence for his or her recommendation.

In conclusion, the letter's author fails to adequately support the recommendation that Oak City civic club membership be restricted to local residents. To strengthen the argument, the author must provide dear evidence that non-residents who work in Oak City do not understand local issues as well as residents do. To better evaluate the argument, we would need more information about why non-resident business people in Oak City have not joined Elm City's civic club during the last ten years.

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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.5 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 15 15
No. of Words: 399 350
No. of Characters: 2007 1500
No. of Different Words: 165 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.469 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.03 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.711 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 135 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 91 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 76 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 50 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.6 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.45 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.533 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.408 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.577 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.123 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5