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005 The following appeared in an announcement issued by the


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Dear All,

Could you comment on this essay please?

Thanks.

 

The following appeared in an announcement issued by the publisher of The Mercury, a weekly newspaper.“Since a competing lower-priced newspaper, The Bugle, was started five years ago, The Mercury’s circulation has declined by 10,000 readers. The best way to get more people to read The Mercury is to reduce its price below that of The Bugle, at least until circulation increases to former levels. The increased circulation of The Mercury will attract more businesses to buy advertising

space in the paper.”

 

 

The statement’s line of reasoning is that a reduction in price would lead to an increase in Mercury’s readership. Let us view this line of thinking from various perspectives.

 

 

Firstly, Mercury needs to ask itself if a fall in readership is mainly attributed to a higher price than its competitors. Though this could be a factor in the fall of readership, there may be other factors as well. For Example, has Mercury compared its newspaper to Bugle’s newspaper in terms of quality content, market penetration, size of the newspaper (number of pages) and costs incurred in running the plant? If Bugle scores higher than Mercury on any combination of these points then we may have an answer. A fall in price may result in a short-lived peak in sales depending on the points mentioned above.

 

 

Secondly, Mercury needs to precisely identify its cause for fall in readership. If it were due to quality of content, then a mere reduction in price would not be a solution to its woes. We could rule out the possibility of the masses being unaware of Mercury as the statement leads us to believe that Mercury has been a player for at least half a decade.

 

 

Thirdly, if we were to assume that a reduction in price would lead to an increase in readership, we have no evidence to prove that it would lead to an increase in advertising as well. We have no information about the market or the audience that Mercury caters to. It may well be the case that advertising has saturated in the audience that Mercury targets. The statement gives us no information to conclude for or against the same.

 

 

In conclusion, given the lack of information, we cannot exactly pin point the effects of a reduction in price. If the statement would give us more information regarding Mercury’s current predicament, we would be better poised to comment. If we are to assume that Mercury’s woes are primarily due to its higher price and that they match Bugle one to one or better in terms of quality of content, size and market penetration, then and only then can we say that a reduction in price bears a high correlation to an increase in readership and a increase in advertising.

 

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  • 1 year later...

Hi All,

Could u please rate my esay and comment on it.

 

The following appeared in an announcement issued by the publisher of The Mercury, a weekly newspaper.

 

“Since a competing lower-priced newspaper, The Bugle, was started five years ago, The Mercury’s circulation has declined by 10,000 readers. The best way to get more people to read The Mercury is to reduce its price below that of The Bugle, at least until circulation increases to former levels. The increased circulation of The Mercury will attract more businesses to buy advertising space in the paper.”

 

 

In the announcement the publisher attributes the decline in the sales of The mercury to the advent of a lower priced competitor The Bugle. The argument has a couple of faulty assumptions and conclusions.

 

Firstly this assumption is not very convincing because Newspapers are a cheap medium of news distribution and presence of lower priced competitors seldom has an adverse effect on the sales of a particular brand.

 

There might be other aspects to this argument which have not been presented like the quality and the content of the presentation.The bugle might be scoring over The mercury by the virtue of it being a more attractive material.

 

For example in Kolkata The Statesman which had been once the premier news paper brand is today languishing with a handful of customers.It failed to evolve and adapt in the face of the competition and despite being one of the cheapest news papers around has vanished into oblivion.

 

However in order to proceed further we may assume that the price factor might be the most and important factor in determining the market share.In that case the solution that has been presented seems to be of a stop-gap kind of arrangement.

 

The newspaper intends to drop its price below that of the bugle until the market share is wrested back.

 

The assumption that an increased circulation will attract more advertisements is not entirely flawed but not concrete either because the advertisements rates in the mercury might not be attractive enough.Therefore without analysing this factor it is inappropriate to make assumptions.

 

Secondly the abstract fails to propose a long term solution for the problem and instead ends up proposing a solution on implementation of which the The newspaper might end up losing more than gaining.

 

 

In conclusion therefore the statement could modify its line of reasoning and a bit more introspective data could be used to propose a solution.

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Hi, I think you know what you want to say but you lack few basic concepts about essay writing.

 

1- Stay with the structure of 5-paragraph essay.

 

2- Each paragraph should have a main point to deliver.

 

3- State your position rite at the top.

 

4- I like that you use examples from personal experience. GMAT people like that.

 

5- Stay away from using “It” and “Being”. Apply what you learned in sentence correction.

 

6- You need two spaces after a full stop “end of sentence period", and one space after a comma.

 

7- This is how I would write such an essay. Mine is not the best but it is a good template. I scored 5 on AWA using this template.

 

8- Good luck.

 

 

The argument presented is not convincing. The author concludes that the Mercury newspaper lost 10,000 readers because a competitor newspaper, the Bugle, has started circulating 5 years ago. There are several questionable assumptions resulting in a logical gap between the premise and the conclusion.

 

 

A major assumption in this argument is that the quality of the material in both newspapers is the same. This assumption may as well be wrong because it is impossible for any two newspapers to have writers and editors that are exactly the same. Readers relate to certain writers based on personal preferences and relation. Each newspaper has various writers and each writer has his/her own readers.

 

 

The validity of the conclusion also depends on proving that the 10,000 readers that the Mercury newspaper lost are now buying the Bugle newspaper, a key concept omitted. For if these readers, for example, started reading magazines instead of newspapers, it is not fare to blame that shift on the starting of the Bugle newspaper. I, for one, stopped reading newspapers 5 years ago and started reading articles online or downloading reading materials from the Internet.

 

 

Finally, even if the two assumptions discussed above were true, the argument would be unconvincing because, without providing any evidence, it requires guarantee that readers will start buying the Mercury newspaper once the price is reduced. Many readers don’t abandon a favorite writer because another one became available for less. Also, many readers are in favorite of best entertainment or knowledge no matter how much it costs.

 

 

In order to make the conclusion more persuasive, the author would have to demonstrate that the assumptions discussed above are in fact true. Thus evidence supporting similar material in both newspapers, the 10,000 readers that the Mercury lost are now buying the Bugle, and readers are willing to return to the Mercury if the price is reduced would tighten the link between the premises and the conclusion, making the reasoning more sound. Without any discussions of these ideas, however, it is impossible to evaluate the conclusion.

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  • 7 years later...

hi this is my answer to this argument .could you pleas rate my essay and tell me how can i improve it .thank you

 

The argument above avers that the mercury newspaper should lower its price less than the bugle newspaper to increase its circulation in to a level that it had in the past .due to this measure it can attract more businesses to advertise in this newspaper .to support this assertion ,the author states that the start of bugle newspaper with low price is the cause of losing market shares and decreasing circulation .the argument is open to a lot of questions and it’s based on dubious assumptions .neither are the premises convincing nor is the conclusion compelling and thus it fails to be persuasive.

 

First ,the author commits the confused cause and effect fallacy.there is no concrete data available that the decline in the circulation of mercury is due to start of bugle which its price is lower .mabe loosing the market share of mercury is due to other factors like decreasing in the quality of the contents in newspaper or mabe the reader groups of bugle are different from those of mercury .

 

Second ,if it were true that start of bugle is the cause for decreasing in the circulation of the mercury ,there could be a lot of other factors that can make the circulation better .like advertising for the newspaper or innovating in the writing the different parts that can attract more people .

 

To buttress this argument the author woud do well if he give more information a bout the peple who read both newspapers and their interests then we could better understand the influence of lower price on circulation . mabe the people who read the mercury are not price sensitive but the bugle have readers that price is very important for them.

 

In summary, had the author taken the above mentioned factors in to view ,the argument would have been rendered incontrovertible, but what has been presented here is not convincing and fails to be plausible.

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