The following appeared in an article in a magazine for writers.
"A recent study showed that in describing a typical day's conversation, people make an average of 23 references to watching television and only 1 reference to reading fiction. This result suggests that, compared with the television industry, the publishing and bookselling industries are likely to decline in profitability. Therefore, people who wish to have careers as writers should acquire training and experience in writing for television rather than for print media." - GRE Argument 106
This article cites a recent study showing that during a typical day people make an average of 23 references to watching television but only one reference to reading fiction. From these statistics the author reasons that the television industry must be far more profitable than the book-publishing industry, then concludes that people seeking careers in writing should acquire training and experience in television writing. This argument is flawed in several critical respects.
First of all, the article's author has not shown the study upon which the argument depends to be statistically reliable...
Subscribe as testbig VIP readers and get unlimited access to essays on the top list.
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: 19 15
No. of Words: 515 350
No. of Characters: 2797 1500
No. of Different Words: 229 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.764 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.431 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.965 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 219 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 174 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 119 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 81 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27.105 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.877 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.684 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.356 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.59 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.106 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 6 5