"During the past year, Quiot Manufacturing had 30 percent more on-the-job accidents than at the nearby Panoply Industries plant, where the work shifts are one hour shorter than ours. Experts say that significant contributing factors in many on-the-job accidents are fatigue and sleep deprivation among workers. Therefore, to reduce the number of on-the-job accidents at Quiot and thereby increase productivity, we should shorten each of our three work shifts by one hour so that employees will get adequate amounts of sleep."
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 vice president of Quiot manufacturing has proposed to reduce the shift work hours by an hour, based on the study that number of accidents is directly related with worker fatigue. He also brings in comparison of number of accidents in Quiot with that in Panoply which has a less number of working hours to support this point. However, the assumptions and evidence used to arrive at the conclusion are of dubious nature. In order to better evaluate the argument, additional evidences and analysis is needed.
To start with, the first assumption that the vice president has made is comparing the number of on -the-job accidents in Quiot with that in Panoply Industries. But, there is no evidence that shows that the two industries are identical in any way. Hence, it is a callous assumption that irrespective of what and how the Panoply Industry produces, its accident rate can be compared with that of the Quiot. It is possible that the kind of product the Panoply industry makes does not involve manual intervention. There could also be the case that the total number of workers working in the other industry is much lesser that those in the Quiot. In which case, the total number of on-the-job accidents cannot be compared for the two industries. Therefore, further evidence is needed to establish that the two industries are comparable to each other in the first place.
The second assumption that is made is that reducing an hour from each shift will help reduce the number of accidents, as it assumed that it will give more time for the workers to sleep. How do we know whether the worker in that extra hour of break, will sleep and not engage in some other activity. There is no such evidence provided to support this assumption. On the contrary, if the workers in that extra hour, engage in a more physically taxing activity then they would be more tired the next shift. Evidence must therefore be provided to support this claim of an extra hour equals extra hour of sleep for every worker. Unless this is established, the assumption is on dubious ground.
Furthermore, by reducing the working hours per shift, the vice president assumes that the workers will become more productive than before. This assumption is not supported by any evidence and can in turn upend. If, the productivity does not increase as expected, the profits of the Quiot would go down. However, if the vice president could provide evidence that suggests that increasing breaks results in higher productivity, then in that case, the evidence could support the conclusion.
To sum, the vice president has arrived at a conclusion which might be interesting to try out. However, the evidence present are not tested and firmly grounded with facts and therefore, they cannot be posit as supporting arguments to the conclusion of reducing work hours can lead to reduce accidents and increase productivity in Quiot.
Discourse Markers used:
['also', 'but', 'first', 'furthermore', 'hence', 'however', 'if', 'second', 'so', 'then', 'therefore', 'kind of', 'on the contrary', 'to start with', 'in the first place']
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance in Part of Speech:
Nouns: 0.231910946197 0.25644967241 90% => OK
Verbs: 0.17439703154 0.15541462614 112% => OK
Adjectives: 0.0630797773655 0.0836205057962 75% => OK
Adverbs: 0.0500927643785 0.0520304965353 96% => OK
Pronouns: 0.0166975881262 0.0272364105082 61% => OK
Prepositions: 0.148423005566 0.125424944231 118% => OK
Participles: 0.0519480519481 0.0416121511921 125% => OK
Conjunctions: 2.62688895959 2.79052419416 94% => OK
Infinitives: 0.025974025974 0.026700313972 97% => OK
Particles: 0.00371057513915 0.001811407834 205% => OK
Determiners: 0.128014842301 0.113004496875 113% => OK
Modal_auxiliary: 0.0296846011132 0.0255425247493 116% => OK
WH_determiners: 0.012987012987 0.0127820249294 102% => OK
Vocabulary words and sentences:
No of characters: 2898.0 2731.13054187 106% => OK
No of words: 490.0 446.07635468 110% => OK
Chars per words: 5.91428571429 6.12365571057 97% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.70488508055 4.57801047555 103% => OK
words length more than 5 chars: 0.344897959184 0.378187486979 91% => OK
words length more than 6 chars: 0.259183673469 0.287650121315 90% => OK
words length more than 7 chars: 0.187755102041 0.208842608468 90% => OK
words length more than 8 chars: 0.116326530612 0.135150697306 86% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.62688895959 2.79052419416 94% => OK
Unique words: 207.0 207.018472906 100% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.422448979592 0.469332199767 90% => OK
Word variations: 47.5597037106 52.1807786196 91% => OK
How many sentences: 23.0 20.039408867 115% => OK
Sentence length: 21.3043478261 23.2022227129 92% => OK
Sentence length SD: 44.2275436167 57.7814097925 77% => OK
Chars per sentence: 126.0 141.986410481 89% => OK
Words per sentence: 21.3043478261 23.2022227129 92% => OK
Discourse Markers: 0.652173913043 0.724660767414 90% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.14285714286 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 3.58251231527 0% => OK
Readability: 47.222715173 51.9672348444 91% => OK
Elegance: 1.79230769231 1.8405768891 97% => OK
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.420977416661 0.441005458295 95% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence: 0.136094303157 0.135418324435 100% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence SD: 0.0893544415763 0.0829849096947 108% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence: 0.574008148716 0.58762219726 98% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence SD: 0.142875623401 0.147661913831 97% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.193225144334 0.193483328276 100% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.107643368703 0.0970749176394 111% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence: 0.462712313118 0.42659136922 108% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence SD: 0.104984656765 0.0774707102158 136% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.29220958822 0.312017818177 94% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0845843379818 0.0698173142475 121% => OK
Task Achievement:
Sentences with positive sentiment : 10.0 8.33743842365 120% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 10.0 6.87684729064 145% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 3.0 4.82512315271 62% => OK
Positive topic words: 10.0 6.46551724138 155% => OK
Negative topic words: 9.0 5.36822660099 168% => OK
Neutral topic words: 3.0 2.82389162562 106% => OK
Total topic words: 22.0 14.657635468 150% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
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Rates: 70.83 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.25 Out of 6 -- The score is based on the average performance of 20,000 argument essays. This e-grader is not smart enough to check on arguments.
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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.