The following is taken from a memo from the advertising director of the Super Screen Movie Production Company.
"According to a recent report from our marketing department, during the past year, fewer people attended Super Screen-produced movies than in any other year. And yet the percentage of positive reviews by movie reviewers about specific Super Screen movies actually increased during the past year. Clearly, the contents of these reviews are not reaching enough of our prospective viewers. Thus, the problem lies not with the quality of our movies but with the public's lack of awareness that movies of good quality are available. Super Screen should therefore allocate a greater share of its budget next year to reaching the public through advertising."
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.
It is indeed worrying when a big production house that invests a lot of money for producing movies does not make the kind of profits that it desires. But, what needs to be considered is, do the films that they produce deserve to make the kind of money that they are hoping for?
The crux of the recommendation is based on a report from the marketing department of the company. What needs to be verified thoroughly are the numbers in this report. Does it compare the budget of each movie and the money that it made, or does it only use the average money spent and the total profit made last year? Since the cost of production varies a lot based on the actors, location and so on, it is unclear if the movies talked about here are big-budget movies not making money or movies that were made on a smaller scale. Unless the report is comprehensive, listing all of these factors and even additional data like the money made by movies made by other production house, the conclusions that can be made from the report will remain highly ambiguous.
Following up on a point made in the previous paragraph, in the case of movie viewership, a lot depends on the kind of cinema that is made. Usually, big budget, action movies or romantic comedies draw out a huge audience and make the lion share of movies that make some profit in any given year. On the contrary, movies that receive critical acclaim goes to win movie awards, though ends up being box-office flops - as is usually the case. Hence, if the production house made more of the latter, it is not very surprising if they ended up not making much money and the fact that only fewer people attended these movies corroborates with this argument.
Additionally, what could also be the case if last year was generally a bad year for movies. Like was mentioned before, in the absence of corroborating evidence, nothing can be claimed unequivocally regarding movie trends from last year. If all the production houses were running losses, then the concern lies elsewhere and allocating more budget to movies may not help the company sail past their predicament.
Also, whatever positive reviews that the report claims to have received from the reviewers will not help provide any credibility to the recommendation, unless and until the nature of the data is clear. For example, the positive reviews received is a percent of what? What were the specific movies that received these reviews? What is unique about them? What was their budget? How much money did they make compared to the ones that did not receive any positive review.?
Further, an assumption is made that, these positive reviews are not reaching the prospective viewers and the public end up being unaware of the good quality movies that were made. However, going by one of my assertions previously, all good movies need not be crowd pullers. Historically, there have been many movies that crashed at the box office but went to win the Grammys and Oscars.f
Furthermore, simply increasing the budget to reach out to the public may not prove that effective. The argument does not mention clearly how effective the previous marketing strategies were. If the limitation is not stemming from the budget, but rather from the lack of creative input from the marketing department, that is the area that needs to be rectified and they need to brainstorm more to come up with innovative and novel solutions to take their movies to the public.
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Comments
Essay evaluation report
argument 1 -- not OK. in GRE, we always accept all data/study/survey are true or correct.
argument 2 -- not OK. maybe other reasons caused the decline.
argument 3 -- OK. argument 1 and argument 2 can be removed. argument 3 is enough.
argument 4 -- not exactly. better: suppose there are totally 10 movies. while only 2 specific movies got positive reviews, but other 8 movies may get average reviews or negative reviews.
argument 5 -- not OK. need to argue this:
Clearly, the contents of these reviews are not reaching enough of our prospective viewers. Thus, the problem lies not with the quality of our movies but with the public's lack of awareness that movies of good quality are available.
we may argue like:
maybe the contents of these reviews reached people, but people may watch online, by DVD, or by phone...
argument 6 -- OK
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flaws:
No. of Words: 597 350 //three or four arguments are enough
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 3.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 26 15
No. of Words: 597 350
No. of Characters: 2778 1500
No. of Different Words: 268 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.943 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.653 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.446 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 182 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 122 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 80 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 52 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 22.962 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 11.185 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.577 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.284 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.508 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.083 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 6 5
Thank you for the review.
Thank you for the review.
Regarding 1, the idea I wanted to convey was that the data may not be comprehensive and we need more data to corroborate.
And I did word argument 4 thus - *the positive review is a percent of what*, may be total number of reviews, all movies released ?
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 5, column 353, Rule ID: ENGLISH_WORD_REPEAT_BEGINNING_RULE
Message: Three successive sentences begin with the same word. Reword the sentence or use a thesaurus to find a synonym.
...ese reviews? What is unique about them? What was their budget? How much money did th...
^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, but, furthermore, hence, however, if, may, regarding, so, then, for example, kind of, on the contrary
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 36.0 19.6327345309 183% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 9.0 12.9520958084 69% => OK
Conjunction : 17.0 11.1786427146 152% => OK
Relative clauses : 21.0 13.6137724551 154% => OK
Pronoun: 43.0 28.8173652695 149% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 75.0 55.5748502994 135% => OK
Nominalization: 19.0 16.3942115768 116% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2851.0 2260.96107784 126% => OK
No of words: 597.0 441.139720559 135% => OK
Chars per words: 4.77554438861 5.12650576532 93% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.94303383012 4.56307096286 108% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.53761811749 2.78398813304 91% => OK
Unique words: 282.0 204.123752495 138% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.472361809045 0.468620217663 101% => OK
syllable_count: 903.6 705.55239521 128% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 6.0 8.76447105788 68% => OK
Subordination: 7.0 2.70958083832 258% => Less adverbial clause wanted.
Conjunction: 2.0 1.67365269461 119% => OK
Preposition: 5.0 4.22255489022 118% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 25.0 19.7664670659 126% => OK
Sentence length: 23.0 22.8473053892 101% => OK
Sentence length SD: 65.4180892414 57.8364921388 113% => OK
Chars per sentence: 114.04 119.503703932 95% => OK
Words per sentence: 23.88 23.324526521 102% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.28 5.70786347227 75% => OK
Paragraphs: 7.0 5.15768463074 136% => Less paragraphs wanted.
Language errors: 1.0 5.25449101796 19% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 13.0 8.20758483034 158% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 6.0 6.88822355289 87% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 6.0 4.67664670659 128% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.224613821606 0.218282227539 103% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0667541784109 0.0743258471296 90% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0525575571977 0.0701772020484 75% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.114323138469 0.128457276422 89% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0462008988344 0.0628817314937 73% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 13.0 14.3799401198 90% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 56.59 48.3550499002 117% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 11.1 12.197005988 91% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 10.74 12.5979740519 85% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.35 8.32208582834 100% => OK
difficult_words: 135.0 98.500998004 137% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 10.5 12.3882235529 85% => OK
gunning_fog: 11.2 11.1389221557 101% => OK
text_standard: 11.0 11.9071856287 92% => OK
What are above readability scores?
---------------------
Maximum six paragraphs wanted.
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.