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

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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 cancelled 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 discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.

The author asserts that restoring air time devoted to weather and local news to its formal level shall not only avoid losing advertising revenues - but shall attract new viewers to the show. However, is argument is based on rather vague facts, lacking important information and is rife with leaps of faith, rather than discernible logic.

The author state a fact by which 'most complaints' have been received from viewer concerned with the station's coverage of local news and weather. The vague notion is lacking in context, without which we cannot determine the nature of the complaints, nor do we know the amount of complaints. Perhaps very few complaints have been received all together and most of the complaints had accumulated to only several complaints, a mere low percentage of the amount of viewers. We are neither given with information of the content of these complaints - should it be complaints regarding the quality of the reports and not their length, then there is lacking basis for the argument. Only through a valid, representative survey of the whole range of viewers of the station, unraveling the true nature of those complaints and a verifiable percentage of dissatisfaction could the argument be considered a valid one.

However, even if a survey executed and found valid, there is still little certainty regarding the reason for case of advertisers' contracts cancellations. It is true that there is a correlation between the case, but no apparent retractable, measurable causation. Perhaps there has been a financial crisis causing the advertising companies to cancel, or perhaps a competing station has reduced it advertising prices - we cannot verify by the information given. To strengthen the argument, the author would benefit by examining the true nature of these cancellations.

Last, the conclusion suggests that in order to attract additional viewers and avoid losing further advertising revenues, they must restore local weather and local news on-air time. No where in the argument does the author betray information that there has been a decline in numbers of viewers, nor additional viewers will want to see the late night show due to this change. Such evidence could could be added to the conducted survey with viewers - be it current viewers, asking if this will keep their loyalty - or of the potential crowd.

In sum, several unwarranted assumption, along lacking information and vague leap of faiths has led to a poor conclusion, which ultimately, could prove detrimental to the financial state of the late night show.

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Average: 8 (2 votes)
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Comments

argument 1 -- OK

argument 2 -- OK

argument 3 -- OK
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.0 out of 6
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 15 15
No. of Words: 412 350
No. of Characters: 2095 1500
No. of Different Words: 203 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.505 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.085 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.777 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 153 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 119 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 74 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 59 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27.467 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 5.954 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.4 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.349 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.613 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.129 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5