Hi, does anyone have a bit of time to take a quick look at my AWA, I'd really appreciate it!
Essay Prompt:
The following appeared as part of an article reviewing summer camps for children.
Parents, if you need a summer camp for your children look no further than Federville Farms. In a recent survey, Federville Farms ranked first in both overall camper satisfaction and in food quality, and second in the variety of outdoor activities. Federville Farms has been family owned and operated for over forty years, so you have nothing to worry about when it comes to your child's safety, and it employs more Red Cross certified lifeguards than any other camp in the state. If you seek the best camp experience for your children, Federville Farms is the best choice you can make.
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
AWA:
The argument claims that the so called “Federville Farms” summer camp is the best option when it comes to summer camps mentioning certain qualifications that make said summer camp stand out of the rest of the competition. Stated in this way however, the argument neglects to provide a basis of information that support a relation between the advantages of the camp and its undoubtedly superior positioning in regards to all other camps.
First, the argument mentions a variety of different surveys in order to imply that the “Federville Farms” summer camp is the best choice one could possible make. While this might generally provide an adequate support of the argument, no indication about the representativeness of the survey and the surveyed people are made. The survey could for example concern only a very small amount of people that would thus provide no information about the general opinion of the summer camp and consequently fail to provide adequate support for the claims made.
The argument could have been much clearer if it would have explicitly stated that the surveys represented concern a sufficient amount of people that is also varied and not distorted in any way.
Second, the argument uses the fact that the camp is family owned as an advantage when it comes to children’s safety. This seems like a bit of a stretch, as the argument conveys no proper relation between both phenomenon. Even tough the camp has been family operated for a relatively long time, one cannot readily assume that this is sufficiently to rule out any safety issues whatsoever. It seems as tough the argument made use of a simple assumption between the positive cause and effect relationship of being family owned and therefore safer. The argument could have elaborated on this and made it more concise by listing premises indicating support for the claim made, such as statistical evidence arguing in favour of the above mentioned relationship.
In conclusion the argument is flawed a variety of reasons and is therefore very unconvincing in making a claim about “Federville Farms” superiority to other camps. The arguments reasoning could have been considered more convincing if it had included more information about the representativeness and generality of its claims made and the information used to support those.
In order to accurately assess the merits of such a situation it would have been necessary to have full knowledge of the contributing factors considered. Without this kind of information the argument remains unsubstantiated and conveys a possibly distorted view of facts, making it open to debate.