Advertisers often try to sell you things by exaggerating about the quality of their products. It helps them get your attention. And exaggeration in advertising is usually considered acceptable, but not always. In the United States, there are laws to help determine what advertisers can say about their products. Basically, the law says advertisers can exaggerate as long as no one’s gonna actually believe the exaggeration and take it literally. So, the exaggeration has to be very extreme. If it’s not extreme enough and someone would actually buy the product because they believed the exaggeration, that advertisement may be illegal.
Take this example: a vacuum cleaner manufacturer made a vacuum cleaner that didn’t weigh very much, and they wanted to get the point across about how light it was. So they made a TV commercial showing the vacuum cleaner floating in the air while cleaning the house. Well, that was a visual exaggeration. It got people’s attention. And because a floating vacuum cleaner is obviously impossible, the commercial was legal because no one would actually believe the visual exaggeration and buy the vacuum cleaner because they thought it floated in the air.
But what if the company wanted to show that the vacuum cleaner was very powerful? What if it made a television commercial where a person uses the vacuum cleaner to perfectly clean this really big and really dirty carpet in, uh, just a few seconds. Well that would really grab your attention. But the thing is, even though the commercial is an exaggeration, you can imagine someone actually believing it and buying the vacuum cleaner and then being very disappointed because the vacuum cleaner couldn’t do that. So advertisers can’t use an exaggeration like that because it’s actually not extreme enough and someone might believe it.
Using the example of the vacuum cleaner, explain when it is legally acceptable to use exaggeration in advertising and when it is not.
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 401.0 578.828451883 69% => Need more words or more difficult words.
No of words: 112.0 151.265690377 74% => More words wanted. You may: choose simpler words or speak faster or remove hesitations or remove long pauses, and fully use the time, do NOT save one or two seconds.
Chars per words: 3.58035714286 3.82278263415 94% => OK
Fourth root words length: 3.2531531234 3.50058242952 93% => OK
Word Length SD: 1.77098838857 1.80425224433 98% => OK
Unique words: 73.0 92.4686192469 79% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.651785714286 0.61298525976 106% => OK
Syllable count: 130.5 182.283891213 72% => The syllable count is low.
Avg_syllables_per_word: 1.2 1.20543933054 100% => OK
Performance on coherence:
Topic speech coherence ratio: 0.0892857142857 0.0839705835288 106% => OK
Acoustic performance on paragraphs:
How many acoustic paragraphs: 4.0 4.47071129707 89% => OK
Average paragraph length: 28.0 65.8948926009 42% => The average paragraph length is low.
STD paragraph length: 20.5304651676 19.7758100068 104% => OK
Average paragraph duration: 11.1425 25.5208953607 44% => OK
STD paragraph duration: 8.49137025161 7.49434385956 113% => OK
Acoustic performance on sentences:
How many acoustic sentences: 45.0 42.9832635983 105% => OK
Average acoustic sentence length: 2.48888888889 3.78147595546 66% => OK
STD acoustic sentence length: 2.19719237232 2.94285465224 75% => OK
Average acoustic sentences duration: 0.924 1.39386743896 66% => OK
STD acoustic sentences duration: 0.845971893413 0.967747756167 87% => OK
Acoustic performance on acoustic silence:(An acoustic silence means a little pause between two or more words)
How many acoustic silence: 42.0 40.4456066946 104% => OK
Total acoustic silence duration: 6.25 7.59280334728 82% => OK
Average acoustic silence duration: 0.14880952381 0.19053887516 78% => Maybe the speech rate is too fast.
STD acoustic silence duration: 0.106775295452 0.157467062838 68% => OK
Acoustic performance on acoustic words:
Total word duration: 33.38 46.3453556485 72% => Need to talk more.
Average word duration: 0.298035714286 0.308780311121 97% => OK
STD word duration: 0.16592187967 0.201157623399 82% => OK
Disfluencies: like hesitations, or 'ehn' or taking a long time to pronounce a word:
How many disfluencies: 8.0 8.09623430962 99% => OK
Total_disfluencies_duration: 5.47 6.56692468619 83% => OK
Total acoustic noise duration: 3.33 3.53066945607 94% => OK
Acoustic rates:
Total speech duration: 44.57 59.5455230126 75% => Talk more. Do not save time. People can talk 4-5 words in one second.
Compare to expected duration: 0.742833333333 0.992425383543 75% => Some seconds left. Need to talk more.
Rate of silence: 0.942337895445 0.681803438845 138% => Less acoustic silences wanted.
Rate of speech: 2.51290105452 2.53813033465 99% => OK
Rate of speech by unique words: 1.63787300875 1.55221717717 106% => OK
Rate of word duration by unique words: 2.1869382864 1.99939622689 109% => OK
Average articulation rates: 0.243812830357 0.309613076454 79% => OK
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Rates: 56.6666666667 out of 100
Scores by speech e-grader: 17.0 Out of 30
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Note: the speech e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas.