Hi everyone,
this is my response to the 'Analyze an Argument' topic from ScoreItNow!. I would really appreciate any advice of how to improve my writing, because the system has evaluated my response with the score 3 and I am not really sure why it is so. I know that I struggle with English (since it's my second language) and that the response is anything but exhaustive. But is there anything obviously wrong in this answer?
The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station.
"Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this time period, most of the complaints received from viewers were concerned with our station's coverage of weather and local news. In addition, local businesses that used to advertise during our late-night news program have just canceled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to the program and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should restore the time devoted to weather and local news to its former level."
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.
Your Answer:
There are several reasons, why the managers' conclusion could be wrong. Even though the conclusion in the memorandum can be ultimately true and there are no other options how to solve the problem, it would be very good to know some important information abou the viewers or current competition.
First of all, the paragraph mentions that the complaints from the past years were concernd mainly about the station's coverage of weather and local news, but it does not provide the neither the number of complaints nor the percentage of complaints with respect to total number of late-news viewers. It is a well-known fact that those, who are not satisfied with an issue of any kind, are always much more active in terms of offering their feedback, than those, who are happy about the contemporary situation. As a result, there might be much more viewers, who prefer national news from weather or local news, but TV station only does not know about them, because these viewers do not offer so much feedback about their satisfaction as their "opponents" offer about their dissatisfaction. The change in program would only worsen the contemporary situation.
But even if the TV station knew about the distribution of their viewers' preferences, the major problem can be hidden somewhere else, concerning with the news quality, for example. Firstly, the quality itself could worsen in the past years, but this would be easily noticeable by the television's managers, and secondly, there might appear another competitor, who offers the same product, such as national news broadcasting at the same time, whose quality of news is much better. Hence, if this information would be available, the late-night program would only have to focus on quality of the national news instead of changing the whole program, which could, in addition, have unexpected or even more negative results in terms of popularity.
In a summary, if the TV station would be able to collect such data as the viewers' preferences, their distribution and the current situation on the market (i.e. if there are appeared any new competition), the TV managers could more likely handle the situation and increase the the channel's popularity again.