The following appeared in a memo from the director of student housing at Buckingham College.
"To serve the housing needs of our students, Buckingham College should build a number of new dormitories. Buckingham's enrollment is growing and, based on current trends, will double over the next 50 years, thus making existing dormitory space inadequate. Moreover, the average rent for an apartment in our town has risen in recent years. Consequently, students will find it increasingly difficult to afford off-campus housing. Finally, attractive new dormitories would make prospective students more likely to enroll at Buckingham."
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.
While it may be necessary to build new apartments in the Buckingham College, the author's argument does not point out sufficient evidence to support his/her conclusion.
The author mentions a current trend that forecasts the growth of Buckingham's enrollment, however, we don't know for sure, what factors the trends have taken into account. Probably, each year the college gets more students who live in the same city where the college is located, and they might not need dorms or apartments to move on, since they have all necessary services at home.
Additionally, students might rather to study at Buckingham college for the quality of professors it has, and not for the dormitories or the attractions they can find on it. Certainly, it could be a plus in a future, however, it is not a strong factor that influence on students decisions at this time.
Furthermore, the statement that students will find difficult to afford off-campus housing, can not be used to support the author's argument; since it is not mentioned if the housing fees at college are relatively lowed compared to an apartment rent. Besides that, a group of students could agree to share the apartment and each one would contribute with the rent, in this way, it could be more affordable paying the in-campus housing that living off campus.
In order to decide that new dorms are needed to be build on campus, it would be useful to know through a survey if the students are comfortable with the actual dorms and if the new enrollment students, the college gets each semester, live close to campus.
flaws:
No. of Words: 269 350
No. of Characters: 1270 1500
No. of Different Words: 142 200
Write the essay with more vocabulary words.
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 3.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 8 15
No. of Words: 269 350
No. of Characters: 1270 1500
No. of Different Words: 142 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.05 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.721 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.605 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 86 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 68 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 48 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 31 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 33.625 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.364 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.75 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.426 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.795 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.114 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5