The following appeared in a memo from the sales manager of Eco-Power, a company that manufactures tools and home appliances.
"Many popular radio and television commercials use memorable tunes and song lyrics to call attention to the products being advertised. Indeed, a recent study of high school students showed that 85 percent could easily recognize the tunes used to advertise leading soft drinks and fast-food restaurants. Despite our company's extensive advertising in magazines during the past year, sales of our home appliances declined. Therefore, to boost company profits, we should now switch to advertisements featuring a distinctive song."- GRE Argument 115
In this memo Eco-Power's sales manager recommends that the company switch from print ads to ads with catchy songs in order to reverse its declining profits. To support this recommendation the memo cites the fact that most high-school students easily recognize tunes used to advertise leading soft-drinks and fast-food restaurants. However, the argument is unconvincing in light of several problems.
A threshold problem with the argument is that the author assumes that the current ad strategy is the cause of Eco-Power's declining profits. The author provides no evidence that this is the case...
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.5 out of 6
Category: Excellent Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 20 15
No. of Words: 482 350
No. of Characters: 2543 1500
No. of Different Words: 225 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.686 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.276 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.806 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 185 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 161 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 114 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 71 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 24.1 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.587 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.45 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.333 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.548 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.123 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5