GMAT Essays (AWA)

Hi,
I will be very thankful if someone can rate this arguement essay.

thanks


"Advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily Gazette will help you increase your sales.
Consider the results of a study conducted last month.
Thirty sale items from a store in downtown Marston were advertised in the Gazette for four days.
Each time one or more of the 30 items was purchased, clerks asked whether the shopper had read the ad.
Two-thirds of the 200 shoppers asked answered in the affirmative. Furthermore, more than half the customers
who answered in the affirmative spent over $100 in the store."





My Essay
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Advertising in general has gained a lot of importance during the past 5 years and new techniques of advertising have emerged.
Some people say that the tsunami of advertisements hitting their senses has made them immune to them and that the value of the
advertisements in truthfully promoting the products is gone. However there are others who really find a lot of value
in the advertisements. They argue that a healthy competition between similar products to get the consumer's attention will
eventually help in imparting the relevent knowledge needed to make a purchase decision.
In the preceding statement, the author claims that advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily
Gazette will help grocery stores increase their sales. Though this claim may well have merit, the author presents a poorly reasoned
argument, based on several questionable premeses and assumptions. Based solely on the evidence the author offers, we cannot
accept this argument as valid.

The primary issue with author's reasoning lies in his unsubstantiated premeses. A shopper's acknowledgement that he or she has read
the adversement does not imply that the advertisement was the only reason that the shopper was purchasing that item at that store.
He/she could many other reasons for purchasing that item at that store: maybe that grocery store was closer to his home or work or it was
on the way to his destination or maybe that item is a necessary item and so people go and buy it. The author does not mention
who the shoppers were. Were they a self selected sample? Were they representative of the population of Morston? Is 200 the right
sample size to make his/her conclusions about the entire population of Marston? All these flaws leads
to one conclusion, namely, that the author's premeses, which is the basis of his argument lacks evidentiary support and renders the
conclusion unacceptable.

In addition, the author makes several assumptions that remain unproven. The author erroneously assumes that
66 out of 200 customers answering the affirmative is sufficient to conclude about the entire population. Author also assumes
that the set of people (more than half of the customers who answered that they saw the advertisement) who spent more than $100
spent only because of the advertisement. The author presents no evidence to prove that the people spent $100 only because of the
advertisement. The author weakens his/her argument by making assumptions and failing to provide evidence to prove his argument.

While the author does have several key issues in his argument's premeses and assumptions, that is not to say that the entire argument
is without base. The author could strengthen his argument by providing evidence for his premesis and assumptions. For example, he/she
can explain content of the advertisement, ie., the item, discount and comparitive prices of the item in other stores. He/she could
show the makeup of the 200 shoppers and how they were selected to prove clear randomness in the selection. He/she could show
relationship between the sample size and the population of Morston to prove that 200 is the right sample size for the experiment.
Though there are several issues with the author's reasoning at present, he/she can improve the argument significantly with
research and clarification.

In sum, the author's illogical argument is based on unsupported premeses and unsubstantiated assumptions that render this conclusion
invalid. If the author truly hopes to change the readers' minds, he would have to largely restructure his argument,
fix the flaws in his logic, clearly explicate his assumptions and provide evidentiary support. Without these, the poorly
reasoned argument will convince few people.