The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants.
"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little impact on our customers. In fact, only about 2 percent of customers have complained, indicating that an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change. Furthermore, many servers have reported that a number of customers who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. Clearly, either these customers do not distinguish butter from margarine or they use the term 'butter' to refer to either butter or margarine."
Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.
In the given memorandum, it states that the customers have difficulties in catching the differences between butter and margarine or they consider butter which includes both butter and margarine. This conclusion was drawn from the observations after Happy Pancake House substituted butter with margarine: only a few customers expressed their dissatisfaction with the change, and many cases with no complaints were reported when providing margarine instead for those who ordered butter. While the conclusion of memorandum may make sense, there are other possibilities worth considering.
Firstly, the customers might not significantly care about whether the restaurants put butter or margarine in their pancakes while distinguishing the different tastes and thinking margarine is not a subcategory of butter. If the customers do not feel significant unsatisfaction with the taste of changed ingredients, there is no reason to complain about it. In general, customers expect the restaurants to provide them delicious pancakes less considering what the restaurants put on them unless it is harmful or detrimental. Even if they made an order with prejudice that butter tastes better than margarine, the customers might have changed their mind to putting margarine is also not bad after receiving pancakes with margarine and did not complain about it. In this case, the drawn conclusion does not hold water.
Secondly, more customers might have felt uncomfortable receiving a pancake with margarine instead of butter, but they were too lazy to make complaints. In order to complain, the customer needs to search for the restaurants’ number, make a call, explain the situation specifically, and wait for answers from the restaurants. If the restaurants receive complaints only online, its process gets more difficult. Since going through either of these entire processes is time-consuming and tiresome, not every customer with dissatisfaction make complaints. Therefore, there might be even more people who were unhappy with the wrong ingredients who did not express their complaints. In this case, it is premature to consider those who did not complain about margarine have a disability of distinguishing butter and margarine or a misconception pertaining to margarine (margarine is a kind of butter).
To sum up, the explanation, as it stands now, is considerably flawed due to the lack of evidence in drawing the conclusion. It was demonstrated that there are possible alternative explanations for the given facts besides the author’s. In order to concrete the conclusion in the memorandum, the author will have to consider the stated alternatives and reject them with credible evidence.
Comments
e-rater score report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 3.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 8 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 4 2
No. of Sentences: 16 15
No. of Words: 411 350
No. of Characters: 2227 1500
No. of Different Words: 198 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.503 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.418 4.6
Word Length SD: 3.088 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 159 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 129 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 106 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 82 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 25.688 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.583 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.688 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.347 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.347 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.088 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 1 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 3, column 850, Rule ID: ENGLISH_WORD_REPEAT_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a word
Suggestion: margarine
...garine or a misconception pertaining to margarine margarine is a kind of butter. To sum up, the ex...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, besides, but, first, firstly, if, may, second, secondly, so, therefore, while, in general, kind of, to sum up
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 16.0 19.6327345309 81% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 6.0 12.9520958084 46% => OK
Conjunction : 14.0 11.1786427146 125% => OK
Relative clauses : 9.0 13.6137724551 66% => More relative clauses wanted.
Pronoun: 27.0 28.8173652695 94% => OK
Preposition: 56.0 55.5748502994 101% => OK
Nominalization: 8.0 16.3942115768 49% => More nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2282.0 2260.96107784 101% => OK
No of words: 411.0 441.139720559 93% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.55231143552 5.12650576532 108% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.50256981431 4.56307096286 99% => OK
Word Length SD: 3.18849369277 2.78398813304 115% => OK
Unique words: 205.0 204.123752495 100% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.498783454988 0.468620217663 106% => OK
syllable_count: 712.8 705.55239521 101% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.59920159681 106% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 6.0 8.76447105788 68% => OK
Subordination: 6.0 2.70958083832 221% => Less adverbial clause wanted.
Conjunction: 3.0 1.67365269461 179% => OK
Preposition: 8.0 4.22255489022 189% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 17.0 19.7664670659 86% => OK
Sentence length: 24.0 22.8473053892 105% => OK
Sentence length SD: 57.8397739135 57.8364921388 100% => OK
Chars per sentence: 134.235294118 119.503703932 112% => OK
Words per sentence: 24.1764705882 23.324526521 104% => OK
Discourse Markers: 6.76470588235 5.70786347227 119% => OK
Paragraphs: 4.0 5.15768463074 78% => More paragraphs wanted.
Language errors: 1.0 5.25449101796 19% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 4.0 8.20758483034 49% => More positive sentences wanted.
Sentences with negative sentiment : 11.0 6.88822355289 160% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 2.0 4.67664670659 43% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.205424566804 0.218282227539 94% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.065687064473 0.0743258471296 88% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.055155241521 0.0701772020484 79% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.125670672551 0.128457276422 98% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0630331281793 0.0628817314937 100% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 16.8 14.3799401198 117% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 38.66 48.3550499002 80% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.8 12.197005988 113% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 15.21 12.5979740519 121% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.4 8.32208582834 101% => OK
difficult_words: 93.0 98.500998004 94% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 15.0 12.3882235529 121% => OK
gunning_fog: 11.6 11.1389221557 104% => OK
text_standard: 15.0 11.9071856287 126% => 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.