argument50 薰衣草

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前天下决心一定要写一篇的。 结果写了一个小时。唉。 后面自己写混乱掉了，觉得词穷到不行。 全部是简单词汇和最简单句式⋯⋯　后面都不知道自己在说什么了...已经自己修改过一遍单词和句子。。。不要脸才能把脸挣回来...

An ancient, traditional remedy for insomnia—the scent of lavender flowers—has now been proved effective. In a recent study, 30 volunteers with chronic insomnia slept each night for three weeks on lavender-scented pillows in a controlled room where their sleep was monitored electronically. During the first week, volunteers continued to take their usual sleeping medication. They slept soundly but wakened feeling tired. At the beginning of the second week, the volunteers discontinued their sleeping medication. During that week, they slept less soundly than the previous week and felt even more tired. During the third week, the volunteers slept longer and more soundly than in the previous two weeks. Therefore, the study proves that lavender cures insomnia within a short period of time. [Specific Task Instruction: Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.]

In the argument, the author claims that the scent of lavender flowers is effective to treat insomnia. And the author elaborates an experiment as evidence to support this claim. However, neither the conclusion itself nor the logic led to it is convincing enough to make the argument unvulnerable.

The threshold problem of this argument is that the author simply assumes that the lavender can cure insomnia within a short period of time, while the experiment is actually done in the group of people with chronic insomnia, making the conclusion has no effect-cause relationship with the study. To make his logic compelling, the author should firstly confirm that chronic insomnia is exactly the same thing as insomnia. Actually, besides chronic ones, insomnia includes other types such like ones caused by ephemeral anxious or excited emotions. Besides, no evidence is provided to show whether the patients in the experiment are cured or just get better. It is quiet possible that they increase their quality of sleep, if any, while far from being cured. Without these evidences required above, the author cannot make an effective effect-cause relationship between the investigation and its conclusion.

Although the author could confirm the question above, the argument still has problem by assuming that the investigation substantiates the validity of the lavender. The author does not show any evidence about the standards and critics about the insomnia, but use the words like “soundly” ”tired” to demonstrate the quality of the volunteers’ sleep. It is possible that after three weeks, the patience can still hardly fall asleep, though more soundly after they do, and only sleep say half an hour longer than they did three weeks ago. Or maybe they become more tired when they awake in the third week, which doesn’t supplied in the argument but might be the evidence to show the inefficacy of the lavender. Until giving further evidence to exclude all these possibilities, the author cannot persuade me to accept the conclusion.

Last but not the least, specific evidence is needed to illustrate that the better quality sleep, if can be proved, is caused by and only by the lavender. Perhaps the volunteers cannot fall asleep at the first place because of, rather than insomnia, the strange environment. After three weeks’ adaption, they can sleep better than before. Or perhaps the sleeping medication they took in the first week is work, or they are just too tired to sleep worse. To rolling these holes in the logic and make the argument valid, the experiment should provide another group of people with exact the same situation with this group except the lavender pillows, and observer the differences between these two groups, excluding all the other explanations.

To sum up, in order to make the argument compelling, the author should provide further evidences about the details in the experiment and set up the controlled group, to get available data and make the argument forceful.