The following appeared in the editorial section of a corporate newsletter:
"The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated: a recently published survey indicates that 79 percent of the nearly 1,200 workers who responded to survey questionnaires expressed a high level of interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs."
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
The argument concludes that the common notion that workers are generally apathetic about company’s management issue is false. To support this conclusion, the author cites that a recent survey shows that 79 percent of the workers responded to the survey expressed high level of interest on the topics of reconstructing corporate and redesigning benefits programs. In my opinion, this argument is not sound, however, by following reasons:
First of all, the author mentioned that 79 percent of the 1,200 workers who responded to the survey showed interest on corporate’s reform. However, this 79 percent is not representative of all the workers in the company as the author didn’t mention how many workers work for this company and how many workers were surveyed. It might be possible that there’re thousands of the workers in the company, but the management team only selected a specific group of workers to participate in the survey, by knowing the fact that this group would express positive views of the company. Therefore, the result of the survey cited can not represent the whole crew of the company’s workers.
Moreover, the survey shows that most of the workers who responded to the survey are interested in the topic of corporate reconstructing and the redesign of benefits programs, however, this doesn’t necessarily mean that those workers are not apathetic about company’s management issue. People will seek for changes if they are not satisfied with their current situation, this could be true on those workers in the company. Those workers may be apathetic about the management issue, whereas they still expect the company to become better and reforming is the only way to make this happen. Hence, this evidence is not supportive to the author’s conclusion.
In sum, this argument is not compelling as if fails to address many factors that should be illustrated furtherly. In order to proper conclusion, the author would have to do a thorough survey which can illustrate the views from all the workers and show more evidence to prove those who are interested in the topic of company’s reform are not apathetic about the company’s management issue.
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argument 1 -- not OK. why 'this 79 percent is not representative of all the workers in the company'? maybe it is.
some arguments, like:
1. it works for this company, it may not work for other companies.
2. since it is 'a recently published survey', people may change their ideas later.
3. the survey may happen in one specific country/location/area, may not apply to a common notion.
more...
argument 2 -- OK
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 3.0 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 3.0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 13 15
No. of Words: 356 350
No. of Characters: 1773 1500
No. of Different Words: 157 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.344 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.98 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.642 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 131 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 104 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 67 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 47 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27.385 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 12.08 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.769 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.423 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.599 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.116 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5