The following is a recommendation from the personnel director to thepresident of Acme Publishing Company.
"Many other companies have recently stated that having theiremployees take the Easy Read Speed-Reading Course has greatly improvedproductivity. One graduate of the course was able to read a 500-page report inonly two hours; another graduate rose from an assistant manager to vicepresident of the company in under a year. Obviously, the faster you can read,the more information you can absorb in a single workday. Moreover, Easy Readwould cost Acme only $500 per employee—a small price to pay when you considerthe benefits. Included in this fee is a three-week seminar in Spruce City and alifelong subscription to the Easy Read newsletter. Clearly, Acme would benefitgreatly by requiring all of our employees to take the Easy Read course."
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstatedassumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends onthese assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if theassumptions prove unwarranted.
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While it might be true that we should recommend all the employees to takethe Easy Read Speed-Reading Course and they will benefit a lot from it, thedirector doesn't make cogent inference in this argument. We can easily tellthat the employees are looking forward to make some differences and may alsojust want to improve their reading ability, but this argument is rife withholes and weak or even unstated assumptions. The author has to provide somemore important evidence to protect the argument from being easily toppled dueto being unconvincing.
The author cites that one previous graduate of the course read a 500-pagereport in just two hours. This graduate is a real fast reader only based on theassumptions that this 500-page report was not being too easy read and hetotally understood or comprehended all the parts. It's pretty likely that thisreport was full of verbose and useless descriptions so that he didn't need toread it carefully to know it. Or it is still reasonable that he did read a fair500-page report in only two hours, but the result was that he failed to knowwhat the report was talking about, or even the basic main points of the report.This lack of the evidence to describe the efficiency of the graduate severelyweakens the author's conclusion. To make up for it, the author has to add someexplanations for it which can absolutely validate this piece of evidence.
Likewise, by talking about the graduate who got rose from a simpleassistant manager to vice president of the company in less a year, the directorwants to bridge the promotion with the effect of the course. It's true thatthese two events were just happening chronologically, but there may not be anycause and effect between them. He got the promotion might just because of hisdoing good in the company so his becoming the vice president had nothing to dowith the course. Therefore, the author is likely to be imposing causality tothis graduate. To improve his/her argument, the director has to evaluate moreabout this case, perform some investigations to it and finally effectivelyvalidate his inference.
Last, even if employees will really get huge improved in reading ability,we cannot easily conclude that Acme Publishing Company will benefit greatly forsure. People doing proofread works do should take this course because they aresupposed to read a lot during a day. However, as for people in charge of composingor printing, this course is not so necessary for them. In this sense, if werequire everyone to take this so-called Easy Read Speed-Reading Course, it willbe a waste of money. We are totally able to make use of this bunch of money insome proper ways. Unless the author provides more information to strengthen thecausality between forcing each employee to take the course and Acme having abright future, we are not possible to consider this recommendation any further.
How to make Acme Publishing Company more efficient and promising needs tobe considered and scrutinized. Requiring all the employees to take the EasyRead course is likely to be one way to achieve it. But some evidence in thisargument seems not that convincing because some of their assumptions are tooweak or even not stated by the author. Only by adding more relative andpersuasive information can we believe that this recommendation is valid andneed to be taken into practice. | 
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发表于 2013-2-5 15:34:43
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