The following appeared in a memo from a vice president of a large, highly diversified company.
"Ten years ago our company had two new office buildings constructed as regional headquarters for two different regions. The buildings were erected by two different construction companies — Alpha and Zeta. Even though the two buildings had identical floor plans, the building constructed by Zeta cost 30 percent more to build, and its expenses for maintenance last year were twice those of the building constructed by Alpha. Furthermore, the energy consumption of the Zeta building has been higher than that of the Alpha building every year since its construction. Such data, plus the fact that Alpha has a stable workforce with little employee turnover, indicate that we should use Alpha rather than Zeta for our contemplated new building project."
The memo recommends that choosing Zeta is a better option than choosing Alpha for the company’s new project. To strengthen this statement, the memo compares the building constructed by Zeta and the building by Alpha, mentioning that the maintenance fee of the building by Zeta was lower in last year, and the energy consumption was also lower in the Zeta buildings. The little employee turnover in Zeta is also a piece of evidence to prove the excellent of Zeta. Although the recommendation seems logical at first glance, this recommendation is fraught with vague, oversimplified and unwarranted assumptions.
First of all, the comparison in this recommendation is incomplete and selective. The memo mentions that the maintenance expenses of the Zeta building was lower that that of the Alpha building in last year. There is no further information about the comparison of maintenance fees in other years. If last year was the only year when the maintenance fee of the Zeta building was lower than that of the Alpha building, the decision would be totally incorrect. In other words, to justify the recommendation, the memo need provide more statistics about the maintenance expenses of the two buildings in other years.
The memo hints that the Zeta building consumes less energy than its counterpart does every year, but the memo fails to analyze the causes. How much energy is consumed depends on many others, such as the number of people in a building and the habits of people in the building. The memo directly contends that the Zeta building consumes less energy because the people in the building know how to save energy, but another possibility is that the number of dwellers in the Zeta building is much smaller than that in the Alpha buildings, and that is why the energy consumption in the Zeta building is lower. Therefore, the memo must give more information about the specific number of dwellers in the two buildings if it wants to make the recommendation persuasive.
Another major assumption in short of legitimacy is the causal relationship claimed between the low employee turnover rate in Zeta and its excellence. When a company has a low employee turnover rate, there are two possibilities linked with this: one is that the company is so brilliant that employees do not resign, while the second possibility is that employees in this company are not ambitious at all, and they just look for stability. Without more information about how diligently employees of Zeta work, the memo cannot prove that Zeta will be a better option than Alpha for the new building project.
To sum up, the recommendation lacks credibility because the evidence cited in the analysis does not lend strong support to what the memo maintains. To better assess the recommendation, the memo must give more information about the comparison of maintenance expenditure of the two buildings in other years. Information about the specific number of people in the two buildings will also be helpful for judging whether the Zeta building behaves better in energy consumption. The low turnover rate in Zeta may not be useful unless we know that employees of Zeta remain ambitious and enjoy working at Zeta.
Comments
e-rater score report
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: 20 15
No. of Words: 529 350
No. of Characters: 2615 1500
No. of Different Words: 197 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.796 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.943 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.81 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 172 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 136 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 109 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 66 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.45 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.984 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.75 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.381 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.569 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.12 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 2, column 1, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...implified and unwarranted assumptions. First of all, the comparison in this rec...
^^^
Line 3, column 161, Rule ID: ENGLISH_WORD_REPEAT_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a word
Suggestion: that
...expenses of the Zeta building was lower that that of the Alpha building in last year. The...
^^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, but, first, if, look, may, second, so, then, therefore, well, while, in short, such as, first of all, in other words, to sum up
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 25.0 19.6327345309 127% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 8.0 12.9520958084 62% => OK
Conjunction : 11.0 11.1786427146 98% => OK
Relative clauses : 18.0 13.6137724551 132% => OK
Pronoun: 26.0 28.8173652695 90% => OK
Preposition: 70.0 55.5748502994 126% => OK
Nominalization: 26.0 16.3942115768 159% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2674.0 2260.96107784 118% => OK
No of words: 529.0 441.139720559 120% => OK
Chars per words: 5.05482041588 5.12650576532 99% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.79583152331 4.56307096286 105% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.87899653323 2.78398813304 103% => OK
Unique words: 201.0 204.123752495 98% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.379962192817 0.468620217663 81% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
syllable_count: 834.3 705.55239521 118% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.6 1.59920159681 100% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 1.0 4.96107784431 20% => OK
Article: 14.0 8.76447105788 160% => OK
Subordination: 4.0 2.70958083832 148% => OK
Conjunction: 5.0 1.67365269461 299% => Less conjunction wanted as sentence beginning.
Preposition: 6.0 4.22255489022 142% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 20.0 19.7664670659 101% => OK
Sentence length: 26.0 22.8473053892 114% => OK
Sentence length SD: 61.240733993 57.8364921388 106% => OK
Chars per sentence: 133.7 119.503703932 112% => OK
Words per sentence: 26.45 23.324526521 113% => OK
Discourse Markers: 6.65 5.70786347227 117% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 2.0 5.25449101796 38% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 10.0 8.20758483034 122% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 6.0 6.88822355289 87% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 4.0 4.67664670659 86% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.186545175879 0.218282227539 85% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0708032088659 0.0743258471296 95% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0554514213797 0.0701772020484 79% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.125279151913 0.128457276422 98% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0123664346106 0.0628817314937 20% => 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: 15.6 14.3799401198 108% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 45.09 48.3550499002 93% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.4 12.197005988 110% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 12.31 12.5979740519 98% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.7 8.32208582834 93% => OK
difficult_words: 93.0 98.500998004 94% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 11.0 12.3882235529 89% => OK
gunning_fog: 12.4 11.1389221557 111% => OK
text_standard: 13.0 11.9071856287 109% => 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.