Arguement220=美丽G程小组=小组第一次作业 by 曦范

曦范UID: 2724845

TOPIC: ARGUMENT220 - The following appeared in an article in a magazine for writers.

"A recent study showed that in describing a typical day's conversation, people make an average of 23 references to watching television and only 1 reference to reading fiction. This result suggests that, compared with the television industry, the publishing and bookselling industries are likely to decline in profitability. Therefore, people who wish to have careers as writers should acquire training and experience in writing for television rather than for print media."
WORDS: 319          TIME: 00:30:00          DATE: 2010/2/22 10:57:40

Based on a survey conducted to reveal people's prefrence for watching TV and reading fictions, the author drawed the conclusion that the publishing and bookselling industry will certainly suffer a decline, and therefore writers had better gain knowledges and skills to writing for the TV programs. While in my opinion, the argument is  lacking sufficient facts and figures to support the author's statement.

First and formost, the survey, as the fundamental evidence to support the author's analysis, is unconvinient because of lacking randomness and representativeness.The author failed to inform us the background of their conversation. It is entirely possible that the respondents talking about TV programs only for finding a topic to communicate, or the survey was conducted in a place with comparatively low literary level, or there was a popular television program broadcasting in that area. Without ruleing out all these possibilities, the author can not make the judgement that people turning more on television than fictions,


Even assume that the survey result is randonmly and representatively, it only informed us that people are unintrested in reading fiction, which do not equal to the dislike to all the books, thus the author's conclusion about a decline in bookselling and publishing industry was drawed too hastly. Since various other kinds of books, as they are the purchsable wisdom, novels, essays, or magazines might still attracting many costomers who are willing to gain knowledge, then the bookselling and publishing industry may as profitable as before.

Besides, the author's recommendation that those who want to become writers should acquire training and experienc in television but not print media was unwarranted. Firstly, an increasing in TV industry do not meaning a decline in printing media, so there might still a high demand of writers in printing media. Secondly, if those future writers are all engaged in the career writing for television, then the society might suffer a over-crowed in television program writing, but highly demand in printing media. Thirdly, the author ignored the willingness of those people, because if simply witting for television prgram is not where there intrests lay, they might not have wonderful scripts.

To sum up, the evidence cited by the author did not lend sufficient support, and lacking some fundamental informations to illustrate. In order to make the argument more convincing, the author would have to provide us more detailed information about the survey, the condition about other books' selling, and take more consideration about the future author's willingness and demands, thus more logically acceptable.