86. The following appeared in a memo at XYZ company.
"When XYZ lays off employees, it pays Delany Personnel Firm to offer those employees assistance in creating résumés and developing interviewing skills, if they so desire. Laid-off employees have benefited greatly from Delany's services: last year those who used Delany found jobs much more quickly than did those who did not. Recently, it has been proposed that we use the less expensive Walsh Personnel Firm in place of Delany. This would be a mistake because eight years ago, when XYZ was using Walsh, only half of the workers we laid off at that time found jobs within a year. Moreover, Delany is clearly superior, as evidenced by its bigger staff and larger number of branch offices. After all, last year Delany's clients took an average of six months to find jobs, whereas Walsh's clients took nine."
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 argument states that Delany Personnel Firm is better than Walsh Personnel Firm. To prove this point, the author provides us with a number of facts, however these facts are based on some faulty assumptions.
Firstly, the author compares the two firms based on their performances that are 8 years apart. In doing so, that author assumes that the market conditions have remain constant in the last 8 years, which might not be necessarily true. It is possible that the lower performance of Walsh can be attributed to a dearth of job opportunities at that time. In such a scenario, their performance results might not be an accurate estimate of how effective the firms is.
Secondly, the author assumes that a bigger staff and a large number of branch offices is an indication of superiority of Dalany's services. This again is a flawed assumption. There are numerious examples of companies in the market that operate at a small scale but are still known for the quality of product and services they deliver. Therefore, the size of the company cannot be used as a criteria to compare two companies.
Thirdly, the author also compares the average time taken by Dalany's and Walsh's clients to find a job last year. Since Delany's clients took less time to find a job, the author concludes that Delany's services are better. However, the author fails to give us any information about the sample of people on which these results are based. If there is a huge difference in the size of the sample, then these figures are not an actual representation of the effectiveness of the services provided by the company. Suppose, if the sample size for calculating this figures was 300 for Delany and 1000 for Walsh, then it makes sense for Walsh to have a greater average time.
Also, the author does not give us any information about what kind of jobs were people looking for in these samples. The availability of jobs vary a lot based on in which domain are you looking for a job. For example, the market is facing a paucity of data analysts and therefore a person looking for a job in this domain will get a job sooner than a person looking in some other domain. So, we need to make sure that we compare data that is gathered in the same domain.
In conclusion, the author fails to put forward a cogent and pursuasive argument as there are a lot of assumptions in his argument. If the author provides more details about these assumptions, the argument can hold a stronger ground.
Comments
Essay evaluation report
argument 1 -- OK
argument 2 -- OK
argument 3 -- not exactly
argument 4 -- OK
----------------
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.5 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 21 15
No. of Words: 435 350
No. of Characters: 1990 1500
No. of Different Words: 201 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.567 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.575 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.537 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 137 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 94 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 59 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 31 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 20.714 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 6.212 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.714 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.295 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.565 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.137 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 6 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 1, column 211, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...s are based on some faulty assumptions. Firstly, the author compares the two fir...
^^^^^
Line 3, column 161, Rule ID: HAVE_PART_AGREEMENT[1]
Message: Use past participle here: 'remained'.
Suggestion: remained
...assumes that the market conditions have remain constant in the last 8 years, which mig...
^^^^^^
Line 5, column 54, Rule ID: LARGE_NUMBER_OF[1]
Message: Specify a number, remove phrase, or simply use 'many' or 'numerous'
Suggestion: many; numerous
... author assumes that a bigger staff and a large number of branch offices is an indication of supe...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Line 5, column 388, Rule ID: A_PLURAL[1]
Message: Don't use indefinite articles with plural words. Did you mean 'a criterion' or simply 'criteria'?
Suggestion: a criterion; criteria
...e size of the company cannot be used as a criteria to compare two companies. Thirdly, ...
^^^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, but, first, firstly, however, if, look, second, secondly, so, still, then, therefore, third, thirdly, for example, in conclusion, kind of
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 23.0 19.6327345309 117% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 7.0 12.9520958084 54% => OK
Conjunction : 7.0 11.1786427146 63% => OK
Relative clauses : 14.0 13.6137724551 103% => OK
Pronoun: 32.0 28.8173652695 111% => OK
Preposition: 52.0 55.5748502994 94% => OK
Nominalization: 12.0 16.3942115768 73% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2045.0 2260.96107784 90% => OK
No of words: 435.0 441.139720559 99% => OK
Chars per words: 4.70114942529 5.12650576532 92% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.56690854021 4.56307096286 100% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.59631740177 2.78398813304 93% => OK
Unique words: 210.0 204.123752495 103% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.48275862069 0.468620217663 103% => OK
syllable_count: 659.7 705.55239521 94% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 13.0 8.76447105788 148% => OK
Subordination: 4.0 2.70958083832 148% => OK
Conjunction: 0.0 1.67365269461 0% => OK
Preposition: 5.0 4.22255489022 118% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 21.0 19.7664670659 106% => OK
Sentence length: 20.0 22.8473053892 88% => OK
Sentence length SD: 33.4283679277 57.8364921388 58% => The essay contains lots of sentences with the similar length. More sentence varieties wanted.
Chars per sentence: 97.380952381 119.503703932 81% => OK
Words per sentence: 20.7142857143 23.324526521 89% => OK
Discourse Markers: 6.80952380952 5.70786347227 119% => OK
Paragraphs: 6.0 5.15768463074 116% => OK
Language errors: 4.0 5.25449101796 76% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 8.0 8.20758483034 97% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 5.0 6.88822355289 73% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 8.0 4.67664670659 171% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.0549684625131 0.218282227539 25% => The similarity between the topic and the content is low.
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0192251232877 0.0743258471296 26% => Sentence topic similarity is low.
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0297549830813 0.0701772020484 42% => Sentences are similar to each other.
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0329342133361 0.128457276422 26% => Maybe some paragraphs are off the topic.
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.027044870493 0.0628817314937 43% => Paragraphs are similar to each other. Some content may get duplicated or it is not exactly right on the topic.
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 11.1 14.3799401198 77% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 59.64 48.3550499002 123% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 9.9 12.197005988 81% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 9.98 12.5979740519 79% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.79 8.32208582834 94% => OK
difficult_words: 87.0 98.500998004 88% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 8.0 12.3882235529 65% => OK
gunning_fog: 10.0 11.1389221557 90% => OK
text_standard: 10.0 11.9071856287 84% => OK
What are above readability scores?
---------------------
It is not exactly right on the topic in the view of e-grader. Maybe there is a wrong essay topic.
Rates: 16.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 1.0 Out of 6
---------------------
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.