The following appeared as part of an article in a business magazine.
"A recent study rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night showed an association between the amount of sleep the executives need and the success of their firms. Of the advertising firms studied, those whose executives reported needing no more than 6 hours of sleep per night had higher profit margins and faster growth. These results suggest that if a business wants to prosper, it should hire only people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night."
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
The writer of the statement above recommends that in order for businesses to prosper they should only hire people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night. This conclusion is based on a survey claiming that the employees who were not needed to sleep more than six hours per night made their firm more successful. The author makes the conclusion via taking for granted several unsupported assumptions.
To begin with, Secondly, the author recognizes the success of the advertising firms only due to the lesser sleep time of the employees. Such an assumption is highly prone to be a fallacy as there might be myriads of other reasons why the firms are more successful; a resourceful CEO, diligent employees, professional resume, skills, and the education level of the employees. If these are the case, then the sleep patterns of the employees would not be as efficient as the author assumes.
Secondly, even if the advertising company were successful because of the lesser sleep time of the executives, the author hastily assumes that the result of the survey can be generalized to all business jobs. There are three main points missed by the author that preclude the survey to be generalized: the small number of participants, lack of details about the participants, and the limited sample of their occupation. The first crucial point missing in the survey is that the 300 number of people cannot represent the all people consistent with working. The sample is too short to generalize. Moreover, since the study lacks details about the participants in the survey, we can barely generalize its results; for instance, the survey might be viable for certain employees or workers with certain ages, and at the same time, it might not conform with others to bring success.
Lastly, the survey’s sample is restricted to an occupation. The author's unspoken assumption is that no matter how much businesses differ with each other, all can benefit from the 6 hour pattern of sleep of their employees. Nevertheless, the nature of the businesses might be different and demand different amount of sleep from each successful employee. The 300 participants of the survey are executives of advertising firms, what about the other jobs and other firms? an sketcher of the same successful advertising firms might not have a good performance when he/she does not sleep no more than 6 hours per night, let alone the other firms and businesses. Therefore the author needs a more comprehensive study.
In short, the survey cannot be a firm reference to generalize that every business can benefit from hiring employees who need no more than 6 hours sleep per night. As discussed, there are too many unsupported assumptions, with each being potentially unwarranted the whole argument and its conclusion cannot be tenable.
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To begin with, Secondly,
To begin with, firstly,
argument 1 -- OK
argument 2 -- OK
argument 3 -- it is somehow similar to argument 2.
Need to argue against the conclusion:' it should hire only people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night'.
suggested:
The author just comments on the people who sleep less than 6 hours that they had faster growth, but he has not said anything or conducted any analysis on those who sleep for more than 6 hours and still had higher growth margins. Even fixing this number 6 is questionable since there can be people who require still less number of hours yet perform better.
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 1 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 18 15
No. of Words: 465 350
No. of Characters: 2289 1500
No. of Different Words: 205 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.644 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.923 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.669 2.4
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No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 107 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 79 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 63 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 25.833 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 12.406 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.5 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.348 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.56 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.12 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5