argument195 [April小组 第二周作业]

xxstarUID: 2442018

195.The following is a letter from an editor at Liber Publishing Company to the company's president.
"In recent years, Liber has unfortunately moved away from its original mission: to publish the works of regional small-town authors instead of those of big-city authors. Just last year, 90 percent of the novels we published were written by authors who maintain a residence in a big city. Although this change must have been intended to increase profits, it has obviously backfired, because Liber is now in serious financial trouble. The only way to address this problem is to return to our original mission. If we return to publishing only the works of regional small-town authors, our financial troubles will soon be resolved."

提纲：
1、严重的财政问题不一定是出版大城市作家的作品所导致的。
2、大城市作家的作品不一定就不受读者欢迎；90%的数据太一般，没有具体的细分数据，找不到大城市作家作品对市场的影响究竟如何。
3、问题的真正原因还未找到，除了杂志质量的问题，内部管理问题，成本的控制、外部市场拓广问题也值得关注，比如价格、销售渠道、广告促销活动的有效性等等。如果不解决这些问题，出版小城镇作家的作品也不能改变现状。

In this argument，the arguer suggests the sole way to help resolve the serious financial condition of Liber Publishing Company is to publish only the works of regional small-town authors. To support his conclusion, the arguer provides the evidence that concentrating too much on publishing the work of big-city authors in last year doesn’t bring the company more profit, but giving birth to serious financial troubles. Thus, the author suggest to give up the work written by big-city authors, and transfer to regional small-town authors. However, this argument suffers from several critical fallacies.

Firstly, the arguer fails to depict the various effects to the company’s profit condition between publishing the work of regional small-town authors and big-city authors, why publishing the latter’s work will definitely make a loss? The arguer only supply the percentage of published novels written by big-city authors, however, it could not give us a convincing answer to the question we just mentioned merely through this number, neither could it supporting the conclusion that the increase of publish of works created by regional small-town authors will lead to more profit eventually.

Secondly, the arguer commits a fallacy of hasty generalization. Even if the changed mission has make the company’s financial condition more serious, there are also many other possibilities in the reasons to bad financial numbers. In fact, the profit of a company depends not only on the selling volume which directly related with total sale revenue, but also on the cost that has been spent. The rising cost will also bring down the net profit earned by the company, and we could not neglect this possibility considering rising cost is one of the most frequent answers to the failure of a company. The ineffective internal management along with low ability in cost control will inevitably weaken the profit earning ability of the company. Even if the company’s shifting back to publish the works of regional small-town authors could make the books more popular by readers, it could not necessarily comes with the rising volume sold. The price, promotion activities, and condition of sales channels, rival’s actions, or the macro economic fluctuation will all influence the sale of published books. Thus, the profit will be varied concerning the various aspects.

In conclusion, the arguer fails to demonstrate the over-weighted published work of big-city authors cause the serious financial trouble now. To strengthen the argument, the arguer should provide more evidence on the unique and causal relationship between the publishing of novels written by regional small-town authors and the profit level of the company. The additional information on company operation, market competition condition will also be incorporated.

[ 本帖最后由 xxstar 于 2008-3-28 23:42 编辑 ]