The following appeared as part of a promotional campaign to sell advertising space in the Daily Gazette to grocery stores in the Marston area:"Advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily Gazette will help you increase your sales.

Essay topics:

The following appeared as part of a promotional campaign to sell advertising space in the Daily Gazette to grocery stores in the Marston area:

"Advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily Gazette will help you increase your sales. Consider the results of a study conducted last month. Thirty sale items from a store in downtown Marston were advertised in The Gazette for four days. Each time one or more of the 30 items was purchased, clerks asked whether the shopper had read the ad. Two-thirds of the 200 shoppers asked answered in the affirmative. Furthermore, more than half the customers who answered in the affirmative spent over $100 at the store."

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.

In attempt to sell advertising space to grocery stores, the author of a campaign claims that the grocery stores will increase their sales if they advertise the discounted items in Daily Gazette. The line of reasoning is that two-third of the shoppers asked for a survey confirmed that they read the ad and half of those spent more than $100 at the store. However, I think this argument is not convincing because the author fails to address many important factors.

Firstly, the author made an assumption that the store in downtown Marston only advertised in Daily Gazette in order to boost the sales. In the commercial market, there’re a lot of channel available for grocery stores to promote their products, such as email advertising, magazine advertising and radio advertising, etc. It’s very likely that the store promoted their products on multiple media planform, rather than only advertising in Daily Gazette. Therefore, there’s no guarantee that those who came to buy products at the store were attracted by the ad on Daily Gazette, but not by the ad on other media.

Secondly, there’s no evidence showing that the sales of those advertised products is actually growing. It’s possible that the shoppers who answered in the affirmative just came to purchase the products for daily demand, instead of being driven by the ad in Daily Gazette. So, the author would have to provide evidence to prove the sales of advertised products is increasing actually.

Finally, the author mentioned that half of the customers who answered in affirmative spent more than $100 in the store, so that it’s concluded the ad is useful for increasing the sales. However, it could be possible that the number of shopper who spent over $100 is more than that of those who take the survey. The conducted survey only targeted 200 shoppers, it’s hard to decide these are the main force to boost the sales of the store in a certain period.

In sum, this argument is not convincing because it omitted many factors that should be taken into consideration. The author would have to prove that the advertising in Daily Gazette is the only campaign conducted by the store, the sales of advertised items has increased and those who read the ad were the main force to boost the sales.

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Average: 6 (2 votes)
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Comments

Sentence: In the commercial market, there're a lot of channel available for grocery stores to promote their products, such as email advertising, magazine advertising and radio advertising, etc. It's very likely that the store promoted their products on multiple media planform, rather than only advertising in Daily Gazette.
Error: planform Suggestion: platform

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argument 1 -- not exactly. suppose Daily Gazette is the only ad. then how to argue.

suggested arguments:

1. it may work only for last month.

2. suppose it works for this store, it doesn't mean it will work for other business.

3. one sample is not big enough.

argument 2 -- OK

argument 3 -- OK
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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: 1 2
No. of Sentences: 14 15
No. of Words: 385 350
No. of Characters: 1832 1500
No. of Different Words: 160 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.43 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.758 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.467 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 119 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 96 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 65 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 35 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27.5 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.038 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.643 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.408 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.635 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.072 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5