The following appeared in the editorial section of a corporate newsletter.
`The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated: a recently published survey indicates that 79 percent of the nearly 1,200 workers who responded to survey questionnaires expressed a high level of interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs.~
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
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In this argument, the author claims that the common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated. In order to support his/her conclusion, the author shows the evidence that a recently published survey indicates that seventy-nine percent of the nearly one thousand two hundred workers who responded to survey questionnaires expressed a high level of interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programes. But a careful examination can reveal several flaws in the argument.
First of all, the author fails to compare the number of workers who responded the survey with that of worker who did not do so.It is possible that workers who are more concern about the issues in the survey were more likely to respond. Lacking imformation about how many workers responded the questionnares will make the survey invalid.Therefore, the author's conclusion cannot be unconvincing unless he show the fact that the majority of the workers who were asked are interested in management issues.
Moreover, the author does not tell us whether the results of the survey are anonymous or even confidential.If they are not, the worker's responses may be biased in that they may choose the responses most favored by the supervisors who conducted the survey. So that the author should make sure that the results of the survey must be anonymous if she/he wants to reach his/her conclusion.
Last but not the least, the author does not show that how recently the survey was conducted. The survey must be close enough to avoid the historical change. The more rencent the survey is, the more convincing the conclusion is.
Thus, the author incorrectly makes a conclusion that workers are generally concern about management issues based on the fallacious statistics. To make the argument more convincing, the author would cite more accurate and rencent evidence which are more powerful.
听取了sacrati的意见,看了别人的许多文章(只是怕自己水平太低没敢妄加评论),发现很多句子和结构真的很好。仔细学习了一下小虾mm的改写又写了第二篇,不知有没有提高,请大家多拍砖!!
[此贴子已经被作者于2005-8-27 11:19:53编辑过] |