The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station.
"Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this period, most of the complaints received from viewers were concerned with our station's coverage of weather and local news. In addition, local businesses that used to advertise during our late-night news program have canceled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to our news programs and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should expand our coverage of weather and local news on all our news programs."
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 author of this memorandum has stated that changes to a television station has caused increased complaints from its viewers as well as decreased advertising revenue. Therefore, the manager has decided that there should be increased air time for local news and the weather to fix these problems and to attract new viewers. However, though this sounds like a good plan, there are many assumptions this manager makes that should be analyzed.
First, the issue with the news program air time could not be the problem. Instead, it could not be with the quality of the news programs that is the problem. To illustrate, it is possible that a news or weather presenter has said something to offend a lot of people and consequentially, people have been complaining to the news manager about the coverage being too vulgar and not because there is less time devoted to the news program. Thus, the author of the proposal to attract more viewers would be wrong in making the assumption that increasing air time to news or weather programs will increase its viewers.
In addition, there are many reasons as to why advertisers may have pulled their ads from the late-night news program. It is reasonable to assume that the advertizers have pulled their ads from the program due to decreased viewers of the program and therefore the ads. The assumption by the manager that change must be made to increase the number of viewers is reasonable, however there are other plausible explanations that prove this assumption wrong. For example, it may be the case that advertisements have increased in price which caused the local businesses to pull out of the news program. Additionally, it is possible that local businesses have found that advertising was ineffective due to the products themselves that have nothing to do about the news program and decided that it would be a waste of money if they continued to buy air time. Both of these explanations shoot down the possibility that expanding the local news and weather coverage would be needed to increase the
Lastly, there is more than one source of news available that people can use to get news. In the digital age, more and more young people have the news (both local news, national news, and weather) at their fingertips. This means that they do not have to wait until 10pm to hear the news or wait in between annoying ads just to see the weather forecast. If this proves true, then the manager would be incorrect in his assumption that changing late-night coverage would increase the amount of viewers because he or she does not address the problem of mobile electronic devices that deliver all news and weather more effectivly to an entire generation. Also, local businesses may make use of big data gathered by these same mobile devices to track more targeted people for advertisement and pay less than they would for advertisement on late-night news programs. Since the author failed to take this into account, he would also be wrong in his assumption that changing late-night coverage will prevent the decrease in ad revenue.
All in all, the author seems to be making assumptions where one change has caused other problems with out taking into consideration other factors that may have brought about those same changes.
Comments
Essay evaluation 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: 554 350
No. of Characters: 2667 1500
No. of Different Words: 229 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.852 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.814 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.558 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 177 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 140 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 82 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 55 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27.7 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.508 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.75 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.352 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.563 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.152 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 5, column 987, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...coverage would be needed to increase the Lastly, there is more than one source of...
^^^^^
Line 9, column 98, Rule ID: WITH_OUT[1]
Message: This word is usually written together. Did you mean 'without'?
Suggestion: without
...re one change has caused other problems with out taking into consideration other factors...
^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, first, however, if, lastly, may, so, then, therefore, thus, well, as to, for example, in addition, as well as
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 25.0 19.6327345309 127% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 19.0 12.9520958084 147% => OK
Conjunction : 15.0 11.1786427146 134% => OK
Relative clauses : 23.0 13.6137724551 169% => OK
Pronoun: 52.0 28.8173652695 180% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 69.0 55.5748502994 124% => OK
Nominalization: 11.0 16.3942115768 67% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2722.0 2260.96107784 120% => OK
No of words: 554.0 441.139720559 126% => OK
Chars per words: 4.91335740072 5.12650576532 96% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.85151570047 4.56307096286 106% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.62266106841 2.78398813304 94% => OK
Unique words: 232.0 204.123752495 114% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.418772563177 0.468620217663 89% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
syllable_count: 841.5 705.55239521 119% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 7.0 4.96107784431 141% => OK
Article: 6.0 8.76447105788 68% => OK
Subordination: 3.0 2.70958083832 111% => OK
Conjunction: 1.0 1.67365269461 60% => OK
Preposition: 4.0 4.22255489022 95% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 19.0 19.7664670659 96% => OK
Sentence length: 29.0 22.8473053892 127% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively long.
Sentence length SD: 59.5859211094 57.8364921388 103% => OK
Chars per sentence: 143.263157895 119.503703932 120% => OK
Words per sentence: 29.1578947368 23.324526521 125% => OK
Discourse Markers: 6.05263157895 5.70786347227 106% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 2.0 5.25449101796 38% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 7.0 8.20758483034 85% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 9.0 6.88822355289 131% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 3.0 4.67664670659 64% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.36105231876 0.218282227539 165% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.139736236614 0.0743258471296 188% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0691954914971 0.0701772020484 99% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.211540917552 0.128457276422 165% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.109453438251 0.0628817314937 174% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 16.3 14.3799401198 113% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 50.5 48.3550499002 104% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.4 12.197005988 110% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 11.79 12.5979740519 94% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.73 8.32208582834 93% => OK
difficult_words: 93.0 98.500998004 94% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 11.0 12.3882235529 89% => OK
gunning_fog: 13.6 11.1389221557 122% => OK
text_standard: 14.0 11.9071856287 118% => 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.