argument190 51互助组第5次作业 by ruczephyr

ruczephyrUID: 2181202

题目：ARGUMENT190 - The following is a letter to the editor of the Glenville Gazette, a local newspaper.

"Over the past few years, the number of people who have purchased advance tickets for the Glenville Summer Concert series has declined, indicating lack of community support. Although the weather has been unpredictable in the past few years, this cannot be the reason for the decline in advance ticket purchases, because many people attended the concerts even in bad weather. Clearly, then, the reason for the decline is the choice of music, so the organizers of the concert should feature more modern music in the future and should be sure to include music composed by Richerts, whose recordings Glenville residents purchase more often than any other contemporary recordings. This strategy will undoubtedly increase advance ticket purchases and will increase attendance at the concerts."


In this argument, the author tends to persuade the Glenville Summer Concert to follow his strategy of switching to more modern music and including Richerts' music. The whole passage looks reasonable in structure, however, in-depth scrutiny reveals that the logic of the evidences suffer several serious fallacies as follows.

First and foremost, the choice of music would primarily not result in the decrease of attendance of the concert, and other aspects such as the weather would contribute more to the decline. The author deliberately proves that unpredictable weather is not a acceptable reason, however, the weather might disturb the emotion of the audiences and few of them really enjoy the concert. Further, though ,mentioned in the argument, many people also went to concert in spite of bad weather, they only made up of a little proportion of the entire group of audience, and unfortunately the other people chose to stay at home enjoying music from TV or CD, rather than go to concert themselves. Also, other factors alike such as remote location of the concert, poor construction of the buildings and so forth might the the reasons for the decline, while the author unfairly omits all these significant possibilities to have his point convinced.

What is more, regardless other feature of the music is owning to the decline, however, there is no direct information to substantiate that the choice of modern music and especially Richerts' music would be the proper type for the Glenville Summer Concert. As the author does not mention anything about the preference of music, it is entirely possible that people in Glenville favor other types more, such as classical music, jazz, hip-hop ,etc. In addition, even grant that local people of Glenville like modern music most, whether it is wise to choose music composed by Richerts is still open to doubt. Perhaps, people in Glenville all worship some certain composer, and they show little favor or even acceptance to Richerts' music, so if the Concert plays openly his music, it can be predicted that there will be  fewer attendance than years ago. Consequently, the alternative of modern music, especially music by Richerts is too groundless to have the author's point proved.

Last but not least, all these strategies may not work to promote ticket purchases and attendance for some economical reasons. Primarily, such changes might involve in great amount of economic investment, it is quite possible that the switch of music pattern require the concert to purchase new instrument for the technical need of modern music. And also it can not excluded the possibility that the royalty of music composed by Richerts. All these factors seriously increase the expenditure for the concert, so inevitably, to make ends meet, Glenville Summer Concert have to rise the price of the ticket, which might go beyond the economical acceptance of the people in Glenville. Thus, neglecting some potential factors that influence the amount of ticket sales,  the author fails to make me believe that his strategies will definitely increase ticket sales for Glenville Concert.