TOPIC: ARGUMENT180 - The following is a recommendation from the personnel director to the president of Acme Publishing Company.
"Many other companies have recently stated that having their employees take the Easy Read Speed-Reading Course has greatly improved productivity. One graduate of the course was able to read a five-hundred-page report in only two hours; another graduate rose from an assistant manager to vice president 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 Read costs only $500 per employee-a small price to pay when you consider the benefits to Acme. Included in this fee is a three-week seminar in Spruce City and a lifelong subscription to the Easy Read newsletter. Clearly, Acme would benefit greatly by requiring all of our employees to take the Easy Read course."
In this argument, the author concludes that Acme should require all of its employees to take the Easy Read course by citing its advantages on other companies. At first glance, this argument seems well-presented. However, upon a second consideration, these evidences lack a logical statement in support of its conclusion and fail to provide compelling support to make this argument sound and invulnerable.
The threshold problem with this argument is that the author assumes that Acme Publishing Company is similar to the other companies stated above, concerning about staff quality, financial background, operation procedures and so forth.. Although this is entirely possible, the argument lacks evidence to confirm this assumption. It is most likely that Acme is an overstaffed company which is enduring financial difficulties, say, an economic meltdown and poor balancesheets, how can it afford to expanse $500 on every employee? And the education level and reading abilities of its workers are also inaccessible to us, if someone does a perfect job in reading, for example, he or she can effortlessly finish a five-hundred-page reading in less then two hours, there is no need for such a training. Until the author provides further evidence to exclude all these concerns, it is unfounded to reach the conclusion involved in the argument.
The second flaw that weakens the logic of this argument is that the author assumes that employees have greatly improved their productivity relying solely on the reading course. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that it is a necessary case and it is quite possible that the specific graduate may be a special case, since we are not familiar with his background or academic level. An appropriate example is not very far to seek. Maybe he is gifted with a huge and marvelous memory capacity. One case cannot generalize the whole situation. The same problem goes to another graduate who promoted in one year. One year experience includes many career trainings like how to communicate with colleges, how to interact with customers, how to balance work and life and etc. We cannot omit all these by focusing his participation in a reading course. What's more, one's promotion has more to do with his working abilities, which is not a direct consequence of reading training. In short, without better evidence ruling out these and other alternative explanations, it is reasonable to cast considerable doubt on this assumption.
The last but not the least important, even if the author can substantiate all of the foregoing assumptions, his assumption that reading speed increases proportionately with the amount of information one absorbed is still unwarranted, because no compelling evidence is provided to affirm this assumption. The definition of absorbing information gives more weight to a well-understanding of the words the reader comes across, especially in this knowledge explosion era. We need to identify and pick up correct and useful information before and between reading, instead of swallowing everything and boasting the quantities. So reading more cannot equal to absorbing and digesting more. Therefore, under any scenario, adopting the author’s proposal without a critical thinking might harm rather than benefit.
To sum up, the conclusion lacks credibility because the arguer neglected the status of Acme Publishing Company, cited two examples without fully reasoning and judging, obscured the difference between reading and understanding and what’s more, the evidence cited in the analysis does not lend strong support to what the arguer maintains. Therefore, if the author had considered the given factors discussed above, the argument would have been more through and logically acceptable. 作者: johnmclain 时间: 2010-8-11 22:32:05
写的相当好了。很清晰。
1、感觉开头没有实质性的东西。
2、最后那里，因为我们没能把问题都找到，所以改正了你所说的内容，不一定就是acceptable吧？
3、“The last but not the least important,”有人说不好用。作者: johnmclain 时间: 2010-8-11 22:33:36