Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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.
The business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants comments on their recent change of butter with margarine, concluding that the change brings about negligible impact on their customers’ satisfaction. Unlikely to make a cogent case, however, the manager fails to establish a strong connection between the evidence with his or her statement.
While it may be true that only 2 percent of the customers have complained about the change, this number does not translate to a 98 percent of satisfaction rate. For one thing, many of them might have opted to express their dissatisfaction another way, such as tipping less than usual. For another thing, they could have altered to dine at other restaurants where they could have butter, in which case Happy Pancake staff would receive no feedback at all. Either way, the rate of compliant does not accurately reflect the customer’s attitude towards this change.
Citing the report from the servers, the manager assumes their feedback will lead to the conclusion that the customers generally have been happy about the change. Nevertheless, we have to be careful in generalizing based on this ambiguous piece of information: it remains unclear how many percent these servers account for of all the servers the restaurants are currently hiring across the southern region, and whether these servers work at the same places. For example, the company could have a total of 2,000 servers with 2000 of them working in downtown Houston. If all of them reported no customer complaints on the change, it would still be inadequate to reach the conclusion as 10% of their servers is a small fraction, plus downtown Houston could by no means represent the entire southern United States as data from the same location would likely be biased.
To validate this argument, further investigation is needed. For instance, the company could require each branch in the south to hand out questionnaires asking customers’ to comment on this change and their preference. In cases where the participation rate stayed low, they could take measures to spur it such as giving out free gifts as a reward for their cooperation.
Surely experimenting with new products could open up the window to more opportunities and potentially save costs, thus creating more profit for the company. Since the current conclusion is untenable due to the ambiguity of the evidence and fallacies in the manager’s deduction, further scrutiny is needed to evaluate the impact of the replacement.
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: 15 15
No. of Words: 405 350
No. of Characters: 2045 1500
No. of Different Words: 220 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.486 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.049 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.699 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 151 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 113 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 71 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 47 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.513 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.667 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.321 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.597 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.12 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
but, however, if, may, nevertheless, so, still, thus, while, another thing, for example, for instance, in general, such as, for another thing, for one thing
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 10.0 19.6327345309 51% => More to be verbs wanted.
Auxiliary verbs: 13.0 12.9520958084 100% => OK
Conjunction : 5.0 11.1786427146 45% => More conjunction wanted.
Relative clauses : 6.0 13.6137724551 44% => More relative clauses wanted.
Pronoun: 30.0 28.8173652695 104% => OK
Preposition: 59.0 55.5748502994 106% => OK
Nominalization: 18.0 16.3942115768 110% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2120.0 2260.96107784 94% => OK
No of words: 405.0 441.139720559 92% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.23456790123 5.12650576532 102% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.48604634366 4.56307096286 98% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.90150668543 2.78398813304 104% => OK
Unique words: 227.0 204.123752495 111% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.56049382716 0.468620217663 120% => OK
syllable_count: 646.2 705.55239521 92% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.6 1.59920159681 100% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 6.0 8.76447105788 68% => OK
Subordination: 3.0 2.70958083832 111% => OK
Conjunction: 1.0 1.67365269461 60% => OK
Preposition: 5.0 4.22255489022 118% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 15.0 19.7664670659 76% => Need more sentences. Double check the format of sentences, make sure there is a space between two sentences, or have enough periods. And also check the lengths of sentences, maybe they are too long.
Sentence length: 27.0 22.8473053892 118% => OK
Sentence length SD: 61.9456392511 57.8364921388 107% => OK
Chars per sentence: 141.333333333 119.503703932 118% => OK
Words per sentence: 27.0 23.324526521 116% => OK
Discourse Markers: 10.4 5.70786347227 182% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 8.0 8.20758483034 97% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 4.0 6.88822355289 58% => More negative sentences wanted.
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: 0.194283409266 0.218282227539 89% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0666818819051 0.0743258471296 90% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0607792864083 0.0701772020484 87% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.100122376116 0.128457276422 78% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0648477532823 0.0628817314937 103% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 16.7 14.3799401198 116% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 44.07 48.3550499002 91% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.8 12.197005988 113% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 13.35 12.5979740519 106% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.95 8.32208582834 108% => OK
difficult_words: 102.0 98.500998004 104% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 14.0 12.3882235529 113% => OK
gunning_fog: 12.8 11.1389221557 115% => 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.