14. The following appeared as part of an article in a business magazine.
"A recent study rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night showed an association between the amount of sleep the executives need and the success of their firms. Of the advertising firms studied, those whose executives reported needing no more than 6 hours of sleep per night had higher profit margins and faster growth. These results suggest that if a business wants to prosper, it should hire only people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night."
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.
In this argument, the author claims that hiring only people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night can make the success of the business. There seems to be some validity at the first glance, but we immediately found out there are several logical mistakes throughout the whole article. My reasons can be substantiated by the incomming comments:
The author says that a recent study rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night has a large association to the success of the business. There is an assumption that the 300 people are enough to reveal the results. However, 300 people are too small to make a persuasive statistic. For example, when I did my college project that I had to collected some datas about how many hours for people who played videos game per day. I collected only 250 samples to did my test at the first time, and I did not have a perfect result. My professor told me that it is because my samples are too small. When I collected more data, I eventually got significant results. Thus, it is important to collected more data to do the test.
Even if the datas are enough to reveal the results, that is not to say that the higher profit margins and fater growth are because of people who sleep less than 6 hours per night. There is a supposition that people did their work when they did not go to sleep. Nevertheless, lots of people did not like to work during the leisure hours, and we do not have an evidence that these people sleep less 6 hours because they had the job.
The author says that the business who wants to prosper would have to hire people who only need less 6 hours to sleep. However, even the advertising firms are make lots of profit from these people, we cannot say that others industries will reflect the same result as the advertising firms.
To sum up, the author would have to provide more evidence to make valid assumptions he provided. Without such evidence, we cannot jump to the conclusion that only hiring people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night can make the business successful. All in all, if the author provides more precise evidence and mends the logical mistakes, then the argument will be more persuasive.
Comments
Essay evaluation report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 19 15
No. of Words: 405 350
No. of Characters: 1809 1500
No. of Different Words: 178 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.486 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.467 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.339 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 114 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 74 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 44 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 28 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21.316 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 8.348 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.526 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.341 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.55 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.142 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
but, first, however, if, nevertheless, so, then, thus, for example, to sum up
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 15.0 19.6327345309 76% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 12.0 12.9520958084 93% => OK
Conjunction : 6.0 11.1786427146 54% => More conjunction wanted.
Relative clauses : 21.0 13.6137724551 154% => OK
Pronoun: 38.0 28.8173652695 132% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 41.0 55.5748502994 74% => OK
Nominalization: 9.0 16.3942115768 55% => More nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1871.0 2260.96107784 83% => OK
No of words: 405.0 441.139720559 92% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 4.61975308642 5.12650576532 90% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.48604634366 4.56307096286 98% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.42217565805 2.78398813304 87% => OK
Unique words: 185.0 204.123752495 91% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.456790123457 0.468620217663 97% => OK
syllable_count: 574.2 705.55239521 81% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.4 1.59920159681 88% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 8.0 4.96107784431 161% => OK
Article: 4.0 8.76447105788 46% => OK
Subordination: 4.0 2.70958083832 148% => OK
Conjunction: 3.0 1.67365269461 179% => OK
Preposition: 3.0 4.22255489022 71% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 18.0 19.7664670659 91% => OK
Sentence length: 22.0 22.8473053892 96% => OK
Sentence length SD: 54.0632916698 57.8364921388 93% => OK
Chars per sentence: 103.944444444 119.503703932 87% => OK
Words per sentence: 22.5 23.324526521 96% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.27777777778 5.70786347227 75% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 8.0 8.20758483034 97% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 4.0 6.88822355289 58% => More negative sentences wanted.
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: 0.192696790272 0.218282227539 88% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0621417560307 0.0743258471296 84% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0920898186992 0.0701772020484 131% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.102496473376 0.128457276422 80% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0586678949395 0.0628817314937 93% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 11.6 14.3799401198 81% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 66.07 48.3550499002 137% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 9.5 12.197005988 78% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 9.81 12.5979740519 78% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.5 8.32208582834 90% => OK
difficult_words: 71.0 98.500998004 72% => More difficult words wanted.
linsear_write_formula: 14.0 12.3882235529 113% => OK
gunning_fog: 10.8 11.1389221557 97% => OK
text_standard: 10.0 11.9071856287 84% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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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.