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 the article, author has mentioned that a study was conducted, rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night and showed an association between the amount of sleep the executives need and the success of their firms. Based on these ratings, the author has concluded that if a business wants to prosper then it should hire people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night. The argument may appear to compelling at first but, it is based on many assumptions for which there are no evidences.
Firstly, the author assumes that he can predict the success of firms based on the number of hours its executives sleep per night. This is a vague comparison because there are no evidences provided from which it can be stated that number of hours of sleep per night is related to the success of a firm. The number of hours of sleep varies from individual to individual and it usually depends on the work the individual did during the entire day. Long working hours may enervate an individual and eventually he will need more sleep. And long working hours will definitely lead any firm to success. So, just the number of hours of sleep is not sufficient instead, the author should have provided enough information about the number of working hours of these individuals, which would have helped to strengthen the argument.
Secondly, the author has mentioned that the study was conducted on 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives. To make any generalized opinion about the success of a firm, study of 300 individuals is not sufficient. The author should have conducted his study on more individuals from different firms. Also, it is not mentioned how many of them were men and how many were women. Many times, women need to wake up early to do the household work before going to office, because of which they might get less number of hours to sleep. Also, the author has not provided information about the number of days for which these individuals were studied and how much workload they had during these days. If any individual has more workload then it is generally observed that he is not able to sleep long due to the stress of completing the work. Author should have taken care of all these factors before making a generalized opinion.
Finally, the author concludes that if a business wants to prosper then it should hire only those people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night. The author is too quick to jump to this conclusion because any individual should be selected or rejected based on many other factors which may include his experience, depth of knowledge in that particular field and many more. Rejecting any individual just because he sleeps for more than 6 hours per night is not an advisable strategy. Due to this, the firm might end up rejecting many talented individuals who might help to increase profit margins and growth rate of that firm.
Conclusively, we can say that, in its present state, the argument fails to convince its readers due to lack of evidences in support of the conclusion made by the author. In order to strengthen his point, author should have provided information about the number or working hours, the number of days study was conducted and should have involved more than 300 individuals in the same.
argument 1 -- You don't use common sense for argument essays. The correct way is: Ok, we accept the study is true, but it works only for advertising executives, maybe not for an IT company, for example.
argument 2 -- it is out of track from here: 'Many times, women need to wake up early to do the household work before going to office, because of which they might get less number of hours to sleep. Also, the author has not provided information about the number of days for which these individuals were studied and how much workload they had during these days. If any individual has more workload then it is generally observed that he is not able to sleep long due to the stress of completing the work'.
you don't suppose or guess something.
argument 3 -- OK
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 3.0 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
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No. of Words: 578 350
No. of Characters: 2707 1500
No. of Different Words: 216 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.903 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.683 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.459 2.4
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No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 60 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 25.13 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.047 7.5
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Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.362 0.35
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Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.159 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5