The following appeared as part of a campaign to sell advertising time on a local radio station to local businesses:
"The Cumquat Café began advertising on our local radio station this year and was delighted to see its business increase by 10 percent over last year's totals. Their success shows you how you can use radio advertising to make your business more profitable."
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.
This argument claims that local radio advertising will help local businesses to make their businesses more profitable, by taking an example of Cumquat café, which was able to achieve a 10% increase in business over last 10 years’ total after using advertising on its local radio station. The line of reasoning is that the same approach in café is also applicable to other types of local businesses. I found this is not sound, however, because it’s not necessary that the same thing will happen on other businesses. It depends on many other factors.
First of all, this argument fails to differentiate the other local businesses from the café shop. It’s not surprising that the café shop is able to attract customers with radio advertising because most of their targeted customers are those who will listen to the radio station and are willing to try the new stuff advertised on it. However, for some other businesses like professional electronic product, for example, most of their targeted customers are professional engineers who are more willing to investigate their desired products online or through professional consultants than listening to the advertisement on radio stations.
Secondly, this argument fails to address other factors other than the radio advertising that might help the Cumquat café to gain the increased profits this year. A business’s success depends on many important factors like demands for the product, pricing and overall competition. It’s very likely that Cumquat café’s success in this year is because of the creative new products, attractive discount promotion or less competition nearby, etc. It will be more compelling if this argument could provide some convincing evidence like customer survey or detailed annual report of Cumquat café, to prove that it did benefit from radio advertising.
Finally, this argument fails to explain how does the radio advertising program works for the local business. It didn’t mention whether the radio station is able to tailor the advertising for different businesses according to their different needs. Different businesses have different targeted customers, some of them will want their advertisement to be launched right after the music session because their targets are those who love music, while some of them will want their adverting time to be between the rush hours because their targets are the drivers, etc. It’s very important that the radio advertising can adapt itself to those different needs so that it could really help those businesses to gain more profits. However, this argument didn’t make any further clarification on this aspect.
In summary, I don’t think this argument is convincing because it omitted a lot of factors that should be addressed in order to make proper conclusion. If the author has considered the difference between businesses, the other possible factors of a business’s success and the ability of the radio station to tailor the advertising, this argument would be more convincing.
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Comments
Essay evaluation report
argument 1 -- OK, better to put this argument as argument 3.
argument 2 -- OK, better to put this argument as argument 1.
argument 3 -- not OK. here we need to consider the time. maybe it works only for last year. same approach may not work this year. better to put this argument as argument 2.
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 16 15
No. of Words: 480 350
No. of Characters: 2474 1500
No. of Different Words: 208 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.681 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.154 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.684 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 170 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 151 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 91 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 65 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 30 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 18.042 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.688 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.372 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.588 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.126 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 5, column 457, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...omotion or less competition nearby, etc. It will be more compelling if this argum...
^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, finally, first, however, if, really, second, secondly, so, while, for example, in summary, first of all
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 19.0 19.6327345309 97% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 12.0 12.9520958084 93% => OK
Conjunction : 6.0 11.1786427146 54% => More conjunction wanted.
Relative clauses : 14.0 13.6137724551 103% => OK
Pronoun: 49.0 28.8173652695 170% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 59.0 55.5748502994 106% => OK
Nominalization: 21.0 16.3942115768 128% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2596.0 2260.96107784 115% => OK
No of words: 477.0 441.139720559 108% => OK
Chars per words: 5.44234800839 5.12650576532 106% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.67336384929 4.56307096286 102% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.86631190333 2.78398813304 103% => OK
Unique words: 218.0 204.123752495 107% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.457023060797 0.468620217663 98% => OK
syllable_count: 801.9 705.55239521 114% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.59920159681 106% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 11.0 4.96107784431 222% => Less pronouns wanted as sentence beginning.
Article: 3.0 8.76447105788 34% => OK
Subordination: 3.0 2.70958083832 111% => OK
Conjunction: 0.0 1.67365269461 0% => OK
Preposition: 3.0 4.22255489022 71% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 18.0 19.7664670659 91% => OK
Sentence length: 26.0 22.8473053892 114% => OK
Sentence length SD: 77.0409743474 57.8364921388 133% => OK
Chars per sentence: 144.222222222 119.503703932 121% => OK
Words per sentence: 26.5 23.324526521 114% => OK
Discourse Markers: 6.05555555556 5.70786347227 106% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 1.0 5.25449101796 19% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 10.0 8.20758483034 122% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 4.0 6.88822355289 58% => More negative sentences wanted.
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 4.0 4.67664670659 86% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.35109716611 0.218282227539 161% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.127316296068 0.0743258471296 171% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.107649343372 0.0701772020484 153% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.226994160249 0.128457276422 177% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.106340613756 0.0628817314937 169% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 17.4 14.3799401198 121% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 36.63 48.3550499002 76% => OK
smog_index: 11.2 7.1628742515 156% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 14.6 12.197005988 120% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 14.57 12.5979740519 116% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.24 8.32208582834 99% => OK
difficult_words: 100.0 98.500998004 102% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 12.0 12.3882235529 97% => OK
gunning_fog: 12.4 11.1389221557 111% => OK
text_standard: 12.0 11.9071856287 101% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 66.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.0 Out of 6
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.