The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants.
"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little impact on our customers. In fact, only about 2 percent of customers have complained, indicating that an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change. Furthermore, many servers have reported that a number of customers who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. Clearly, either these customers do not distinguish butter from margarine or they use the term 'butter' to refer to either butter or margarine."
Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.
Based on insufficient evidence, business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants claim that customers are not capable to distinguish between butter and margarine. His conclusion is supported by the fact, that only 2 of 100 customers complained when they received margarine instead of butter. Having little evidence given in the memorandum, author's final statement is not convincing and additional evidence are required to strengthen his argumentation.
First and foremost, author boldly assumes that 98 out of 100 people who didn't complained about supplanting butter with margarine, were happy about the change. The fact that only 2 percent of people actually complained, does not necessary mean that the rest felt positive about the change. What if none out of the 98 people was brave enough, or have enough time to file a complain? In fact, some of this 98 people may never come to Happy Pancake House again, because they were might feel cheated.
Secondly, the author claims that the lack of complaints from clients that received margarine instead of butter, when they actually asked for butter, indicates that client that ask for butter actually means butter or margarine. This conclusion is unsupported. It may happen that the customer is not so fastidious to complain, but it cannot be concluded what the client really thinks. It would be not professional to take an order from a client and bring him different thing.
To recapitulate, there is not enough evidence to make such bold assumptions. There can be numerous alternative ways the facts provided in this example can be interpreted. Lack of complaints does not necessarily means that clients are happy about the order. Maybe the amount of tip received after the dissembling service would be a good measure of clients’ satisfaction?
flaws:
No. of Words: 291 350
No. of Different Words: 164 200
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 15 15
No. of Words: 291 350
No. of Characters: 1476 1500
No. of Different Words: 164 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.13 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.072 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.704 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 107 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 77 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 60 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 39 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 19.4 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 6.701 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.4 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.313 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.538 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.058 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5