AWA review

Hi!
I am not a native speaker and I want to improve my English for the AWA.
I have tried to memorize and use the chineseburned awa guide.
First of all, I wonder what you guys believe the attached AWA would have scored as it stands (not corrected).
I am aware of all the miss-spelling and punctuation mistakes, but I would love to hear other areas of improvement.

Argument:
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.”
Discuss how well reasoned . . . etc.

Answear:
The argument claims that The Mercury, a newspaper that relases new editions weekly, needs to reduce its price as a result of a competing lower-priced newspaper. Stated in this way the argument reveals examples of a leap of faith, poor reasoning, and ill-defined terminology. Furthermore, the argument fails to mention several key factors, on the basis of which it could be evaluated. The conclusion of the argument relies on assumptions for which there is no clear evidence. Hence, the argument is unconvincing and has several flaws.

First, the argument readily assumes that The Mercury’s decline of readers is a result of the lower price of The Bugle, which was launched five years ago. This statement is a stretch since it is not properly substantiated in the passage. For example, there could be several other reasons for the decline in the number of readers of The Mercury. Clearly, it is challenging to be certain that something that happened five years ago is the sole reason for the decline. The argument could have been much clearer if it explicitly stated that The Bugle was the sole reason for The Mercury reduction of readers, and that one can see that The Bugle has stolen customers from The Mercury.

Second, the argument readily assumes that to increase the number of readers of The Mercury the company should lower its price belove that of The Bugle. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not demonstrate any correlation between a lower price and an increased number of readers. To illustrate, there might be political or sosial trends in the society that have affected the overall amount of people who reads newpspapers. If the argument had provided evidence that a decrease in the price would result in more readers of The Mercury, then the argument would have been more convincing.

Finally, one might be curiouse of the following questions. Is a price reduction the best way to increase the number of readers? Would it be more beneficial to mirror the price of The Bugle? Without convincing answers to these questions, one is left with the opinion that the argument is more of a wishful thinking rather than substantive evidence.

In conclusion, the argument is flawed for the above-mentioned reasons and is therefore unconvincing. It could be considerably strengthened if the author had provided all the relevant facts. In order to assess a certain decision, it is essential to have full knowledge of all the contributing factors. In this particular case, statistical evidence that supported the correlation and reasoning. Without this information, the argument remains unsubstantiated and open to debate.



Thanks for your attention. I’m looking forward to your reply!