The following appeared as a letter to the editor of a local Solano newspaper. "The Solano school district should do away with its music education programs. After all, music programs are not especially popular in our schools: Only 20 percent of our high sc

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The following appeared as a letter to the editor of a local Solano newspaper. "The Solano school district should do away with its music education programs. After all, music programs are not especially popular in our schools: Only 20 percent of our high school students participated in music programs last year. Furthermore, very few of the Solano district's college-bound students are interested in majoring in music at the university level. Also, when the school district of our neighboring town of Rutherford eliminated its music programs two years ago, the overall grade point average in the high school increased by 10 percent the next year. Surely the money spent on Solano music programs could be better used to improve the quality of traditional academic courses. " Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument.

The author's claim that removal of music education can help improve the academic grades and investing money in music programs is unproductive is completely unsubstantiated. Also the author is lacking to foresee the other dimensions of having music programs in high schools. Firstly, Music can help students to do away with the stress that develops during the academic studies and hence achieve peace, calmness to the mind. Only academics cannot help us achieve great heights , we need to engrave some extra skills in ourselves to make us a better person. Music is one of such skills.

Secondly, the author implies that if only 20 percent students are involved there is no need to keep the program. But this would totally affect the students who have an inclination towards music and want to learn it. The author is being pessimistic and does not have a good vision for music. Since skills like music must be engraved in the students at early age, to develop the appropriate respect for the art. The author mentions that very few students want music as major in universities. Thus, if music education is removed the above category of students would be hampered and there would be no provision for such music lover's to learn music.

Thirdly, the comparison that author is making between Solano and Rutherford district schools is completely flawed. There is no complete data provided by the author to prove that only removal of music helped enhanced the grade point average of the school students. As it is mentioned that it took three years gap for the academics of students to improve after eliminating music program , there can be various other reasons for the improvement of academic grades which are not considered and listed in the argument.

Furthermore, the author is claiming that money can be used for traditional courses instead of music. If this type of action is taken then students having an inclination towards music, would be affected and the overall development of students loving music can be hindered.

To sum up, I would say that the above argument is flawed in many aspects and needs further more study. Also the author is trying to hinder the growth of music lover's by eliminating the music education which is totally wrong in every aspect.

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Score: 4.0 out of 6
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No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
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No. of Sentences: 18 15
No. of Words: 381 350
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No. of Different Words: 192 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.418 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.845 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.493 2.4
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No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 98 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 61 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 28 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21.167 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.493 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.556 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.368 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.565 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.078 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5